Embracing Voice UX: 7 Steps to Building Great Experiences

3. Determine the highest value task.

Armed with this rich understanding of your users’ motives, goals, and challenges, start to percolate some potential solutions. You’ll likely have a number of ideas for ways in which you could improve the lives of your customers, but you’ll need to determine which idea to tackle first. We recommend  surveying your users to establish a quantitative priority for each of those ideas. Then, look for opportunities to score a quick win that will allow you to demonstrate success with this platform and secure additional funding to expand your offering.

4. Conduct concept testing on low-fidelity interactions.

Once you have a clear idea of your priorities, it can be tempting to build a solution and test it. However, an iterative approach to product development is best. Before you invest in building anything, we recommend that you do concept testing with a low-fidelity manifestation your ideas. In UX research for voice, this is often called Wizard of Oz testing because instead of code, there’s a person behind the curtain.

First, map out your conversational interactions, creating rough decision trees and dialogues. Then, do usability testing of the designs to see what you haven’t anticipated. You can do this simply, with the participant in one room, talking to a speakerphone they pretend is a smart speaker, and the person acting as the wizard in another room, responding to the participant by reading from the script.

You can also go to a slightly higher fidelity approach by taking advantage of Amazon Polly, which is text-to-speech software that speaks in Alexa’s voice. In this case, the wizard cuts and pastes written responses into Polly, so the participant hears the replies as if they were coming from Alexa herself. This approach can result in greater delays in response time, but it also reduces the bias that can result from the wizard’s changes in tone or emphasis that would occur when not using Alexa’s voice.

5. Build a business case.

As we previously mentioned, Gartner projects that smart speakers alone will constitute a $3.5 billion market in just three years. Among those who already own smart speakers, 83 percent say they often use their devices as part of their daily routine, and 42 percent now try new voice applications more often than they did during their first month of owning a device, indicating a desire to do even more with their devices. Consumers want to interact with brands in ways that are relevant to them and leverage the unique opportunities of smart-speaker platforms. For a business to succeed in today’s market, they must begin harnessing the power of voice technology.

So where does your product fit into that market? Having gained an understanding of product-human fit and defined a roadmap for solutions or features, you’ll also need to understand the product-market fit. In such an untested market, it may be difficult to develop these projections, but stakeholders want to understand your voice application’s break-even and return on investment (ROI) before allocating budget to your project.

6. Test.

Once you’ve mapped out your intended voice experience and tested it as a concept, it’s time to build it. But before committing it to code, we strongly recommend a design-test-iterate approach to development. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways to test prototypes before voice applications go live. As you know, conducting user research is essential because it can prevent the need to make costly fixes post production. Further, given the high risk that users who have a negative experience with your voice application will abandon it, the importance of this phase of development should not be underestimated.

Sayspring is a free, Web-based, prototyping-software service that lets you easily design for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Similar to the wireframes and visual-design mockups you create for testing application designs, you can use Sayspring to create high-fidelity voice prototypes that let you explore and document the user experience before you start to code. Once you’ve designed your prototype, conducting usability-testing sessions will provide critical insights into what is working well and what isn’t.

Once you’ve built your voice application, you can beta test it using the tools that Amazon and Google provide. Using the available tools, you can test your design changes and invite feedback from friends, family, and your larger network. You should also consider Pulse Labs’s Web-based beta-testing platform, which provides richer insights and lets you upload your own list of test participants or identify your desired demographics and let Pulse Labs find appropriate participants outside your network. While prototyping tools help you to refine your designs before coding begins, beta testing helps you to test your implementation before it goes live.

7. Create an ongoing feedback loop.

Once you’ve launched your voice experience, take advantage of voice-analytics products from Chatbase, Dashbot, or Adobe to understand the actual use of your product. Much like the Web or app analytics we’ve all come to rely on, these products let you track users’ behavior and understand key factors such as active users, engagement, top intents, interaction funnels—even when errors occur—and let you analyze users’ sentiment while engaged with your voice application. This provides important feedback, allowing you to optimize the voice experience—just as you would a Web site or app.

Conclusion

One could argue that every company today is a digital company. A business’s many customers represent an equal or greater number of users on a variety of platforms, including Web, mobile, and tablet. In the coming years, we’ll see a revolution in voice technology that is comparable to the revolutions we’ve already experienced around the Web and mobile devices.

For a brand experience to truly resonate with customers, it must connect with them on several levels. With voice-activated technology, brands have the opportunity to speak directly to their consumers and guide them through a variety of applications. Speech can be highly nuanced, but it also has the power to deliver personal, meaningful experiences. Tapping into voice technologies offers a key differentiator for brands in 2018, and by taking the seven steps we’ve outlined in this article, brands can ensure they’re developing smarter, more efficient, more effective voice technologies.