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IDO GREEN: Hi.
Welcome to our new series of videos
that will bring you news and best practices on Action
on Google.
I'm Ido Green, a developer advocate for Action on Google.
I love to help entrepreneurs and developers
to be more productive.
And today, we're going to learn three design
tips that will help us build better apps for the Google
Assistant.
Cool?
The Google Assistant is a conversation
between the users and Google.
Users can get things done by talking with their system.
Designing a spoken dialogue between a human and a computer
in advance, accounting for all possibilities
both in function and user behavior
and still have it feel natural--
it's harder than it looks or sounds.
The key to building a good voice interface
is not to fall into the trap of simply converting
a graphical user interface into a voice user interface.
This defeats the purpose of using a conversation.
People are not going to change how they talk anytime soon,
so we need to take what we know about human-to-human
conversation and apply it so our apps can talk to humans
in a more natural way.
The top three design tips--
one, create a persona.
Two, think outside the box, literally.
Three, remember that in conversations, there
are no errors.
Now let's go a bit deeper on each of these tips.
Create a persona.
It's a good way to start your design phase
with a persona of your app.
The persona should be based on the user population
and their needs and the imagery and qualities associated
with your app's brand.
It's the consist characters captured by the voice
and interactive experience.
It's the face of the experience for the users, who
they will be talking to.
A persona is conveyed through tone, word or phrase of choice,
style, technique, voice.
Think, for example, about a realtor persona
or a warm friend persona.
Which persona will be best fitted?
Think outside the box, literally.
You should write your core experience
like you would write a screenplay.
This can be scrappy as acting it out with a colleague
and documenting it on a paper or creating an interactive Wizard
of Oz prototype.
You tweak and play until you are ready to start coding.
And then, when you draw out your initial version,
keep it to high level, where the boxes represent
an entire dialogs of user's intent,
but leave out the individual wording you will want
to use in each interaction.
In conversations, there are no errors.
When a problem happens, imagine what
the users hear when your Actions say, I don't understand you.
This is one of the greatest cause of users' frustration
and aversions to voice interfaces.
People get angry and raise their voices
and repeat the same answer.
We need to give people credit for knowing how to speak.
Just because they don't understand a prompt or a choice
doesn't mean they don't speak the language.
So help them be successful.
For example, rather than asking, would you
like to hear about topic A or B and expecting
them to say A or B, ask them precisely,
which of these topics do you prefer, A or B?
See, the first question is both yes, no and either,
or question.
And remember what happened along the way.
Maintain context.
The best way to course correct in advance
while still maintaining a natural, comfortable
conversation is to plan of these occurrences
as if they were any other turn in the conversation.
In other words, treat them as input
that didn't cause any error.
Want to learn more?
Please see the links here and here.
Thanks for watching.
We'd love your feedback, so please don't be a stranger,
and leave us comments below.
Also, please make sure to check out our other episodes.
Until next time, be strong, and create amazing apps.
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