Voice & Chatbot Interfaces

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We developed several FAQ chatbots and an FAQ Alexa skill.  I even wrote a voice & text best practices document because I couldn’t find one to follow.

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My Role
UX Lead, working closely with a single developer.

Deliverables
Wires, Mockups, Prototypes

What I Liked

  • Learning about a technology that was relatively new, and very new to me.
  • A chance to design in a verbal medium.
  • Developing a best practices document for voice/chat UI’s.

The Projects

In my first few months as part of SCE’s Digital Accelerator, we were tasked to create two web chatbots and one Alexa skill that would answer frequently asked questions. 

One of the chatbots was for use on SCE.com and the other was built for Human Resources to help SCE employees find answers quickly and easily.

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I Learned

Voice

  • Voice UI’s are for obtaining very simple information.  More complex concepts are better suited to web or apps.
  • People often use voice when they are multi-tasking or when a very quick answer is needed.

Chatbots

  • Text UI’s / Chatbots can have somewhat more complex info, but they’re still not as good as other methods at complex interactions, like comparison shopping for example.
  • Very special attention has to be paid to copy.  People don’t like to read, so it had to be short and succinct. 

The Best Practices

The biggest challenge for this group of projects was that, at the time, I could find very few best practices for voice and text interfaces, particularly for FAQ skills and chatbots.  Besides consulting the wisdom of Nielsen and Norman and other UX pros, I started reading some my old research papers from grad school.  I read up on mental models, short-term memory, attention spans.

I was also forced to think critically about how questions and answers to FAQ questions should be structured.  Brevity is key. For example, people can’t remember much when Alexa rattles off a paragraph of information.  Nor are people patient enough to read too far if their answer isn’t found in the first sentence or two.

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Michael Blaser

User Experience

mike@mikeblaser.com