Hello everyone, my name is Christine and I'm a PhD student at the University of
Toronto, in the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab working under Cosmin
Munteanu. So, my research is focused on the design of conversational voice
interfaces, and the development of tools to help designers to develop good voice
user interfaces. My research also focuses on improving GUI design training in HCI
education, which I'll be talking about today. So today I'll be talking to you
all about the state of VUI training in HCI education, and why it's important for
HCI educators to incorporate GUI training into their curriculums.
So, as I'm sure we all know, VUI interfaces are growing very quickly in the commercial
market and becoming much more commonplace in our daily lives. They're
in our phones, they're on our desks, and they're in our cars. Some are taking over
health care - as you can see tech companies want your smart speaker to
take on health care. Some you can talk to just like a human. If you guys haven't
heard of Google's duplex, that one's pretty cool. Babies are starting to say
Alexa as their first word, which is quite fascinating, and some even let you talk
to your toilet - at CES 2019 there was an Alexa enhanced toilet which was pretty
cool. As well so devices like Alexa and Google home are everywhere these days, as
voice is seen as a natural form of interacting with technology, and is often
touted as the future of interaction. However are these devices working well
for everyone? If you haven't watched the Italian grandma learning how to use
Google home as depicted here, I encourage you to do so and ask yourself: how does
it work for her? Is it working properly? Is she having a good interaction
experience with the device? We're finding that with the growth
of voice user interfaces, there is an ever-growing challenge for designers to
properly design for voice interaction. This job currently falls to designers
who have already gone through a lot of training to learn how to design for
user interfaces. However we're still finding that voice user interfaces have
a lot of usability issues, as research shows. Why doesn't it work very well
though? We have many other good interfaces and we've been designing them
for decades. So why doesn't it work the same way as, for example, graphical
interfaces? How do we design graphical interfaces? We've currently
gotten to a point where graphical interfaces are so well designed and
usable - for example, the design of a touch-based smartphone like the iPhone.
We've built on and iterated and developed very usable interaction with
graphical interfaces like these. However, now new interaction techniques like
voice are appearing.And current research, as I mentioned before, shows that they
don't work quite as well as we would want. Who is to blame? Do we blame the
designers? Or maybe, do we need to take a little closer of a look at the training
the designers receive? As voice user interface design
progresses, designers need to be properly trained to design for voice interaction.
How are we helping designers adjust to this new interaction technique that they have to design for now,
and how do we train new designers to be ready to design for voice interfaces?
So we've been teaching about how to build good graphical user interfaces for a while now. The courses that I've listed here
are just some of the courses that we offer at U of T that teach about a good
user design using established HCI and methods, and you may have taken or even
taught similar seminars or courses. In fact, the education and training that
many designers have received so far is driven primarily by graphical user
interface design, as of now. Much of the methods and guidelines that we currently
teach are based on the design that were developed decades ago. Things like
Nielsen and Norman's guidelines so on and so forth. Even our assessment methods
and prototyping methods that we teach currently work primarily for GUIs - how
do you do a think aloud or a paper prototype with a voice interface?
So the main question that we explore in our paper is: how is VUI design being
taught in HCI education? Are we teaching it at all? How are we teaching it and
what do we have to start with? To do this we performed a study that consisted of
two phases. The first was a scoping scan of 25 international universities
identify time potentially new courses. This involved going through all the HCI
courses in respective departments, and scanning through both their title
and their course description. The second phase involved a more
in-depth syllabi and course material review of a selection of these courses.
The overall goal was to identify how much of current HCI courses discuss or
are dedicated to VUIs, and what about VUIs is being tied in HCI education? So
to identify the courses that discuss VUIs we use these keywords which were
taken from a previous systematic review on the state of speech in HCI. If a
course title or description contained any of these keywords, it was identified
as a course that discussed VUIs. The goal here for the first phase was to
gather a rough overview of the courses that had VUIs concepts incorporated
into them. So this chart shows the universities and the courses, the amount
of courses in each University that we reviewed. So institutions were selected
according to the number of CHI publications in 2018 and 2019, to get a
rough idea of universities that are highly involved in HCI, and the
departments that the courses were part of largely encompass Computer Science
and iSchool departments. So through all these universities we reviewed every HCI
course that they offer, and we identified based on the keywords how many of those
courses discussed VUI or CUI design. As you can see only half of the
universities contained at least one course that discussed VUIs. and almost
all of the ones that did have something, had only one to two relevant
courses. So as we can see not all of them teach VUIs. So let's break this down a little bit.
From the course titles and descriptions,
we found five main topics among the courses that contain these keywords:
artificial intelligence or intelligent interfaces, emergent or future
interaction/interfaces, human robot interaction, multimodal
interfaces, and speech interfaces. So these are the main course topics that
the courses that talked about VUIs these are how they were framed.
In our second phase we wanted to look deeper into these courses to explore the amount
and focus of VUI discussion in them. So we performed a syllabi and course
material meta review with ten courses, which is shown on the chart to the right.
While we identify 20 courses in the scoping scan, we were only
able to get the course materials for these ten courses from instructors to
review. So we identified four main themes which I will talk about next.
The first theme was the course materials that were related to VUIs.
We identified three main types of course materials: assignments, lectures and
readings. So we found that three out of ten courses had a practical VUI
assignment, four out of ten courses had at least one lecture dedicated to VUIs,
and five out of ten courses had some type of reading or reading list.
dedicated to VUIs.
The next thing we looked at is the breadth and depth of VUI coverage in
these courses. The full details are in the paper, but just a few highlights: an
average of 12% across all courses that have VUI lecture materials were
dedicated to VUIs, with the largest amount being 35% in one course. For the
courses that did have VUI assignments each of these courses had about 4 to 5
assignments in total, but at most only one assignment was dedicated to VUIs or
CUIs, and as we saw in the last slide that was only three of the 10 courses
that we reviewed. The third thing we looked at is how VUIs were framed in
these courses. Again, some main highlights we found that VUIs were often framed in
the context of artificial intelligence or intelligent agents. In relation to
that, there was a large focus on natural language computation and dialogue
systems, when it came to talking about voice and conversational interaction.
And finally as is the focus of our research, we want to explore how much
cover the coverage there was VUI design in particular. We found that only
four courses discussed VUI design, particularly interaction design. The rest
of discussed VUIs at a high level. There was a large focus on dialogue
design, with one course discussing dialogue design of text chatbits in
particular. And finally only two courses actually taught about designing for a
voice based interface - others talked about conversational interfaces in a
medium-agnostic way or focus particularly on text chatbots.
So what can we learn from all this? We found that there is an evident lack of VUI design
training in HCI courses right now. As our review showed most of the conversation
around VUIs in these courses do not focus on instructing designers on how to
design for these interfaces. There's a lot of current research on VUI design
that we can start to incorporate, but this will likely also require
developing theoretical pedagogical tools that can be adopted into practical
training: guidelines, design patterns assessment methods, etc. Developing these
takes time ,and we feel it's necessary to start working on these now. There's also
little focus on voice based interfaces - often the medium is not specified, or
only text-based conversational interfaces are focused on. However there
are unique usability issues with using voice in particular that need to be
addressed. As well there is little focus on interaction design. Often when there
is any discussion about developing these interfaces, the focus is on dialogue
design. Dialogue design is very important, but there are other usability issues
such as feedback, learnability and more that need to be focused on.
In conclusion we want to call on the HCI community to take a step forward and to
further incorporating VUI design training into HCI curriculums. If we
don't incorporate VUI design into our courses now, there are consequences which
will be more difficult to solve as more and more voice interfaces end up in
consumers hands. As mentioned earlier, the development of pedagogical training
tools is also essential in teaching designers how to design for these, in the same way
we have them for VUIs. This of course extends into industry training too,
something we plan to look at in the future. Speaking about the
future, we plan to conduct future work that will involve interviews and
collaboration with both HCI educators and voice interface designers. We would
like to hear from you about how to develop a curriculum for VUI design and
what is important to incorporate into a VUI design curricula. So you may hear
from us soon. If you're interested in being a part please feel free to shoot
us an email at any time. Thank you.