Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product.

Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design.

Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021.

Diana Deibel

Rebecca Evanhoe

We talked about:

Rebbeca and Diana's backgrounds

the differences between designing for voice interfaces and for graphical interfaces

the higher expectations that people have for conversational voice interactions

some of the challenges of designing for voice interactions: navigation, lack of standardization, lower impatience thresholds in voice interactions, etc.

how conversation design fits in the UX field

the principles and concepts that underlie conversation design: personas (of the voice agent), prompts, training data, etc.

the implications for user trust in systems that use AI (artificial intelligence)

conventions around the transition from AI-driven bots to human agents in a conversation system

the ethics of conversation design

practices to instill trust in voice interfaces and allay user privacy concerns

racial and gender and geographical biases that can creep into conversation design

the rapid evolution of the research that underlies conversation design

the challenges of managing the content associated with conversation design

the value of the contributions of humanities disciplines to conversation design

the need for more diverse perspectives in conversational design, and the need to try harder in accomplishing this

Diana and Rebecca's Bios

Diana Deibel, Design Director at Grand Studio in Chicago, is a Brazilian-American award-winning writer and VUI designer with a background in fictional dialogue. She has designed multi-channel voice-first products, chatbots for healthcare, insurance and HR operations, smart speaker skills, and large IVR systems. She is a national speaker and VUI consultant who has set up voice practices for Fortune 100 companies, among others. In addition to conversational design, she has written and produced for a variety of networks and creatives including “Animal Planet” and “Blue Man Group”. She co-created two TV pilots, now in pre-development with One Bowl Productions, and has had several plays produced with the Modern-Day Griot Theatre Company in Brooklyn (under the name Diana de Souza). She loves learning, puns, and leading workshops on dialogue to help others find their voices.

Rebecca Evanhoe, author and conversation designer, has been developing technology that you talk to since 2011 at companies like Amazon Web Services, Mobiquity, and Shadow Health. She has created virtual patient characters for chat-based learning games, bots for fun and service, and interactive experiences for Alexa and Google Home platforms. Along with her experience in voice and conversation, she earned an MFA in creative writing. She teaches conversation design as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, and she leads workshops in a variety of writing genres, from creative to technical to UX. Her fiction can be found in the O. Henry Prize Collection, Harper’s Magazine, Vice, NOON, and Gulf Coast, among others.

Books Mentioned in the Podcast

Conversations With Things (their new book, coming in 2021)

Weapons of Math Destruction

Algorithms of Oppression

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/MTd8LMejX8k