The UX of Voice
Voice & future impact on a UX designer
We live in an incredibly creative digital world alongside a range of different technologies… Old technologies that are constantly being updated, new technologies that is still quite new to many of us, and then there are technologies that we do not even know of or maybe just haven’t been invented yet, such as the hoverboard we saw in Back To the Future.
Some new technologies that are emerging today is actually something we might have seen in a sci-fi movie before, movies that predicted the future. As UX designers and as users overall, we are still figuring out the basics.
Change is challenging, yet satisfying and exciting. The evolution of interest and technologies keep our head in the game. As UX designers, we are forced to stay up to date with new trends, expectations and new tools in order to succeed in the creative world that we live in today.
Our relationship with technology has always been silent, enter.. THE VOICE. Until the voice appeared as a way to interact with technologies. Ever since Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google assistant was brought into our lives, there has been a change in the way we interact with technologies and the way we want to interact with them. These VUI’s are basically “influencers” for people becoming more comfortable with using their voice. Although, voice activated products such as Alexa or Siri are today only helpful to some extent, such as asking about the weather or asking to change a song. They are on the command control stage, and still has a long ways to go.
“Voice is still a baby. There are too much trouble with pronunciation and understanding which decreases its use”. — Quoting my mentor Vinicius Pineschi
How many times have you asked Siri to do something that she cannot do, or simply does not understand and tries to tie it to something completely different? It creates frustrations as well as users wanting the VUI’s to be able to do more. They are missing the most important thing, conversation.
“When humans use their voice, they are wanting a dialogue. They expect that the other part of the dialogue will listen to them and answer questions and bring them a unique solution or their point of view.” — Vinicius Pineschi
How we really want Siri to answer is in a more casual way.
Hey Siri, what’s the status of Corona?
It is a bummer that this got us right? Did you know that in Sweden there are XXX cases? We really need to take this serious.
As UI designer Frederik Gossens is mentioning in his article, digital technologies are currently changing human-computer interaction. And services such as The Grid where websites designs websites, design tasks are more and more becoming automated.
Future
Take a look at Jason Amunwa’s article, where he explains that Voice is not a new direction, rather the next step in UX design. If you think about it, he is right. Every single advancement and improvement of the way we users use our tools was motivated by a need to decrease the amount of friction, basically in order to get more done, faster and easier. We speak faster than we can type. We simply understand each other better by using our voice.
Today, we already have prototyping platforms and tools that makes it easy to prototype VUI’s such as SaySpring. But the question is, what will have changed in about five years from now? How much will Voice have taken over and what exactly will Voice be able to do?
The most crucial aspect a UX designer has to keep in mind when designing voice are the users needs, always. More apps will be voice based and Alexa for instance and Siri, as well as all the other VUI based products will have a way more conversational function with the users. At least that is my belief.
To make VUI “magical” and great, voice interactions need to become more simple as well as conversational. Technologies has to be able to understand words that may have different meanings, just like it does when you talk in real life. As a user you should not have to have a user manual stating what you can say, you should be able to talk like you would normally talk.
Designing voice is slightly different than designing screens. You have to think of user flows for voice, context and memory in voice design, multimodal interactions, accessibility and safety.
Will you be able to prototype by using your voice? If you look at Felipe for Sketch..
where they are speeding up the process of making mock-ups, making it faster than ever to design a simple home- or log in page. What if, in the future you are able to prototype by just talking to your computer screen. “Add another art board, same color”, etc. That would be insane wouldn’t it? But not entirely surprising right??
Nonetheless, voice will be a part of our lives in the future and UX designers can contribute and shape it. I believe UX designers need to realise that it is crucial to stay up to date with whatever this all means and increase skills to be able to “stay in the game”.
Lisa Swärdh
