CONVERSATION DESIGN

CERTIFICATIONS

CareerFoundry_Certificate_Kathy Epperson.jpg

This VUI Design class with CareerFoundry included the successful completion of 17 projects which were critiqued and approved by an assigned mentor who is an expert in the conversation design community. I created three Alexa voice skills during the program, which were approved for publication.

Concepts covered:

  • Designing for voice-only and multimodal interfaces

  • User and system personas for voice

  • User stories

  • Sample dialogs and scripts

  • User flows

  • Usability testing

  • Memory and context in voice design

  • Safety and privacy

  • Accessibility

robocopycert.png

This Conversation Design program with Robocopy (now Conversational Academy) culminated in a 70-question exam and certification. The lessons and exam covered the following and are relevant to both voice assistants and chatbots:

  • Conversation design process

  • User and bot personas and needs

  • Sample dialogs

  • Flowcharts

  • WOZ testing and rewrite

  • Copywriting techniques for motivation, persuasion and engagement

  • Implicit and explicit confirmations

  • Intent recognition, long tail, and repair flow

SAMPLES FROM PROJECT WORK

userpersona.png

USER PERSONA

As part of my course work in Voice User Interface design, I conducted interviews and developed a user persona to help guide the design of an Alexa skill. This persona takes into account speaking style and other factors.

systempersona.png

SYSTEM PERSONA

I also created a system persona to make sure my Alexa skill aligned with the personality, speaking style and more of my user persona.

userflow.png

flow chart

I used Lucidchart to map out the conversation flow for a happy path version of the interaction, with further interactions from WOZ testing or as the project evolved.

voicescriptoutline.png

Voice script

i created a voice script outline for each intent in my project, identifying prompt labels and examples of utterances I would later use when created this Alexa skill. In total for this course, I created 3 Alexa skills (voice-only and multimodal).

OTHER EXPERIMENTATION

After the completion of both courses, I also tinkered with creating projects in Dialogflow and Botsociety. I experimented with prosody (and how differences in cadence and accent between a system voice and a narrator might be perceived by the end user) and with pulling random data from a linked Google Sheet into a voice skill.

More recently, I completed the Build an Einstein Bot module on Trailhead.