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CATHY PEARL: Hi, I'm Cathy Pearl.
And I work at Google as a Conversation Designer.
And today, I want to talk a bit about how conversation
design can boost your business.
Now you might be wondering what is conversation design
and what does a conversation designer actually do?
But before I get into that, I want
to start with some examples of conversations.
Imagine that you have a business in which people can order food.
And you want to make a chat bot.
So you go off and you design your chat bot and you come back
and you show me the design.
And you show it to me in the form
of an example conversation.
And it might go something like this.
You have an order bot that asks, how can I help you?
I, the customer, say, I'd like a tuna salad, please.
You ask me what kind of dressing.
And a tuna salad with honey lemon.
That'll be $11.
How would you like to pay?
Credit card.
Have a nice day.
Thank you.
It looks pretty easy, pretty straightforward.
I mean, how complicated is it really, to order lunch?
And we call this the happy path, when everything just
goes great.
But in real life, it's usually a lot more complicated.
And in fact, the reason that I chose this example,
in the first place is because I had a real-life example
ordering a tuna salad.
And the conversation struck me as so complicated
that when I got back to the office,
I wrote it down, which is the kind of thing
that conversation designers do.
So let's go through that one.
So it started like this.
The cashier said, "How can I help you?"
And I said, "Can I please have the tuna salad?"
And then I paused for a minute because there's actually
several parts to this order.
But humans can only really take in so much audio information
at once.
So I wanted to make sure that he had my attention before I
proceeded.
So then I said, "With croutons."
And I watched him again, press a button.
But then I had a bit of a problem
because I actually go to two different cafes
to order tuna salads.
And they have two different dressings
that sound very similar.
One of them is like, honey lemon.
One of them is lemon herb.
And I can never remember which is which,
hashtag #Firstworldproblems.
And so I wasn't sure.
And so I indicated this with my voice
by saying, "And the lemon or dressing or whatever."
And he didn't even say anything.
He just nodded.
And I knew that he knew what I wanted.
I still don't know which one has which dressing,
and then I finished off with, "To go."
So he told me it'd be $11.
And then he threw another question at me.
And I didn't speak.
I just handed in my credit card.
So there's really a lot going on here,
even though it's a very simple transaction.
There's eye gaze, there's body language,
there's pausing, there's intonation,
all these things we use when we communicate.
And we do it every day without even thinking about it.
But a computer finds this very difficult.
The computer just has the words.
So you have to cram a lot of information
into kind of a small signal.
So imagine that you said to me, "Do you want coffee?"
And I said, "Coffee will keep me awake."
Do I want coffee or not?
Well, it depends.
If you ask me in the morning and I have a big day ahead of me,
it's probably, yes.
I really want some coffee to keep me awake.
But if it's late, I'm about to go to bed, probably means no.
Now, this is another thing, this kind of ambiguity in language
that humans do every day without being really thinking about it.
But it's very hard for computers.
What if I said to you, can I get a ride tomorrow morning?
And a very small amount of time passed without you speaking,
let's say, almost a second.
Well, even though you haven't said anything,
you've already told me something important, which is probably
can't or won't be able to give me a ride.
So even though it's your turn to talk, I'll probably jump in
and say, oh, you're probably too busy.
How about Friday?
Here's an example where important information is being
communicated just in silence.
And again, this is the kind of thing
that computers have a real hard time with.
So what does this mean for you?
If you're thinking about adding voice or text
chat to your business experience,
how should you go about it?
Well, first of all, like with any technology,
you want to think first about what are the problems you're
actually trying to solve.
Sometimes I see companies that just say, oh, we've
got to have a chat bot.
And they just start with that kind of thinking.
And that doesn't always go so smoothly.
So think about, back to basics, how are you
trying to help people?
And then, how can we apply this great technology in order
to do so?
So let's go through a few tips.
First off, lean on real-world conversations.
What do I mean by that?
If your business has a call center with human agents
or agents who do online chat, talk to them.
They are a wealth of information.
They're the ones who are actually interacting
with your customers.
They know what kind of things they want to talk about.
And they know how they ask for them.
Now if you don't have that, think about where in the world
those real life conversations are happening that are related
to what you're trying to do.
For example, if you're making an app that books restaurant
reservations, talk to the people at restaurants
who answer the phone.
Or maybe you have a health care app.
Talk to the nurses, the doctors, the people
who would be having those conversations with people.
In the beginning, especially, steer
clear of open-ended questions and high stakes situations.
So an example of an open-ended question is,
how can I help you?
That seems a really standard thing for a chat bot to ask.
But it usually can have users run into a lot of trouble
because it doesn't really tell them anything about what
your chat bot can do.
So they don't know what they can say or what they can't say.
So it's better to have directed questions
that are a little more specific in those situations.
And high stakes situations, I mean
things like highly emotional things,
like if you have a very unhappy customer
because their product arrived broken,
or if you have a health care situation where
you have to deliver upsetting health news.
Don't outsource those to a bot.
That's where your humans really need to be available.
Sometimes I'll see companies say, oh, the first thing
we'll do is voicify our FAQ.
It seems pretty straightforward.
It's already in a question and answer setup.
But FAQs are often artificially constructed.
You have information you want to communicate to customers,
and so you come up with a question to match the answer,
which as it turns out, is often not the way that people
will actually ask for that information.
So you might have a beautiful Q&A experience.
But nobody asks the questions that you
think they were going to.
Start small.
Don't think you need to create all of your content,
all of your functionality via this chat bot
or voice experience right from the start.
Pick something small, manageable,
maybe routine an intake form or information
that people often ask about, like the return policy.
Start there, get it right, and then expand.
Let your customers have an escape hatch.
If they are frustrated in their chat experience,
let them go to a human.
And if you don't have a human, what else do you have?
Do you have a support email address?
Otherwise, because there are going
to be times when your chat bot can't help them.
And you don't want to leave them frustrated.
Think about the channels you want to be on.
Do you want to do just voice?
Do you want to do text chat?
Do you want to do both?
They're both very useful.
They're great for accessibility reasons.
It's just nice to allow your customers
to communicate with your business
in whatever way they're most comfortable with.
Just keep in mind that voice and text are not identical.
So if you design a text chat bot for example,
you can't just flip a switch and have it be available by voice.
Think about if you are in the chat bot situation on a phone
and you have a visual experience,
you can do things like, which one of these would you like?
And you can have a list.
Or you can have some pictures or something like that.
You can't just easily switch that over to voice.
So just keep that in mind.
Do a lot of prototyping early and often.
You don't have to get fancy.
Those things I did at the beginning
with the tuna salad conversations,
those are called sample dialogues.
And that's how we begin any design experience.
We just start writing those and read them out loud.
Hopefully, you have a partner you can read with.
And it won't just be like I did, reading to myself.
But you'd be amazed at how many problems
you can find just by doing these simple sample dialogue
readings.
And they're low cost, low fidelity.
And you can work out a lot of things early.
Finally, I know I'm biased.
But hire a conversation designer.
I know with a lot of startups, they
say oh, we can't afford to hire a designer.
We'll just have the engineers write the prompts or maybe
the marketing person.
And then we'll change them later.
But hopefully, I've communicated the complexity
of conversations.
And the thing about conversation designers
is we don't just write the words.
We create the whole structure.
And that impacts the code.
It impacts everything.
And so you want to get that right straight out of the gate.
Now if you only remember one thing from this whole talk,
this is the slide.
Design for how people actually talk,
not how you want them to talk.
And what I mean by that is you may create what you think
is a beautiful design and you put it out in the world,
and then you watch people interact with it.
And then you just start cringing because they're
saying all these things that you're like,
but they shouldn't say that.
I never expected that.
But that's how it is people talk in a lot of different ways.
They're going to say things you don't expect.
And that's OK.
And if you can accept that and understand
that you're going to iterate on your design and make it better,
then you're on your way to making really successful
conversational experiences.
Thank you.
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