I’ve just finished reading Conversational Design by Erika Hall. It is a good reminder for the design community that conversational interactions are a mindset (not a chatbot) that can be applied to every single interface we design.

Below are my notes:

Principles of Conversational Design

  • Conversation is not a new interface. It’s the oldest interface. Conversation is how humans interact with one another, and have for millennia. We should be able to use the same principles to make our digital systems easy and intuitive to use by finally getting the machines to play by our rules. Unfortunately, overly literal interpretations of the idea are leading to systems that are hard to use. Being able to exchange text messages with a bot doesn’t necessarily make it easier for people to reach their goals. We must go deeper. Otherwise we’re just making things harder on ourselves and those we’re designing for.
  • Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer. So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.
  • A conversational façade often forces humans to focus more on the limits of technology than on achieving their goals. It’s much more important that a system manifest conversational qualities at a deeper level than try to engage in an interaction that only superficially resembles the real thing.
  • Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.
  • The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.
  • Find the goal of the user and do your part! For conversation to work at all, everyone participating in the project must pitch in to help keep it on track.
  • Provide the right amount of information at the right time. Withholding necessary information or giving too much detail would be unhelpful. A certain amount of empathy and knowledge is implied; you need to know what the correct amount of information is from the point of view of the other person.
  • Only user research provides insight into what the customer needs at different times, in different places, and under different circumstances.
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of speed, or rather the subjective sensation of speed. There are few things that make an interaction more delightful than getting it over with quickly.
  • Successful interactions feel truthful, offer clear verifiable information, and prevent confusion.
  • A truly conversational interaction, then, is tolerant of faults, anticipates errors, and recovers seamlessly.
  • The paradox of creating conversational interfaces –  A superficial resemblance to conversations—using natural language in text or voice—can overpromise the level of cooperation and, in the end, provide a less human experience.
  • The challenge for all designers is to use intentional reasoning to help people make decisions without thinking and acquire habits without effort.

 

The Principles in Practice

  • When confronting a new system, the potential user will have these unspoken questions: Who are you? What can you do for me? Why should I care? How should I feel about you? Why should I trust you? What do you want me to do next?
  • If you can’t distill what you offer into a single introductory sentence you’re putting the work of understanding it onto your potential customer.
  • With larger systems and services, consider in what context, on what device, and with which system representative the relationship is most likely to begin.
  • Identity. Interest. Value. Trust. These are the essential ingredients in every successful introduction. Aim to solve these in as few words as possible.
  • Your product or service will take a quick trip down the memory hole if you: have a name that’s generic, or hard to spell or pronounce; say too little about yourself, or too much about anything; look or sound like other products (benefitting from people’s confusion is a dark pattern); lack a clear, enticing pitch; provide too many options; or use terms that are meaningless to your target customer.
  • If you can use language to create a vivid map in the mind of the user, you can instill confidence and provide ease of use. Even better if your map fits into a pre-existing mental picture and requires no learning.
  • According to James Kalbach’s Designing Web Navigation, structural navigation—the navigation that reflects how an information space is organized—helps users in these ways: Expectation setting: “Will I find what I need here?” Orientation: “Where am I in this site?” Topic switching: “I want to start over.” Reminding: “My session got interrupted. What was I doing?” Boundaries: “What is the scope of this site?”
  • Actions must be goal-oriented, moving the customer closer to their objective. The actions must be context-aware, reflecting the customer’s state (in a hurry, using a mobile device) as well as the state of the system (signed-in). Each discrete action must provide feedback. The user needs to know whether their action succeeded or failed and what to do next. The implications of the action must be clear and apparent. As mentioned earlier, truth in interaction is matching expectations. This is the path to trust and credibility.
  • The better the system matches the customer’s mindset and guides action, the more mistake-proof it will be.
  • All actions must be reversible or provide very clear warning when they represent commitments. Any interface for action that omits or misrepresents the full consequences to the user is failing to be truthful.
  • The context of action – To support the success of the user’s action, the system needs to implicitly or explicitly communicate the following in an efficient and context-aware manner:
    • Prerequisites to action: What does the user need to do before the action is possible? (The user should only be presented with actions they can actually take.)
    • Encouragement to action: How does the system articulate the benefits of taking the action? Instructions for action. Is it as simple as clicking Submit, or are we going down a complex path?
    • Consequences of action: Set expectations of what will happen once the action is taken. Level of commitment. Is it possible to undo this action?
  • The ultimate challenge for designers is to create a system in balance, one that’s transparent about the business goals it represents, while encouraging the user to take those actions that provide value to both the business and the customer.
  • In interaction design, offering just what’s needed for the task at hand is called progressive disclosure.
  • Affordances and clearly labeled actions are not always enough, and that’s okay. Often interfaces end up worse off because designers think that a button label or an icon should do all the work. Combining an unambiguous action along with some additional guidance is the best way to support both habitual customers, and those new to the system or infrequent users.
  • Computers are good at storing and recalling information and people are not. Computers should do all the information storage and retrieval in the relationship. If at any point a computer-based system relies on human memory to function, that system has failed its human. In this regard, password-based authentication is the web’s most epic failure.
  • In general, notifications should require affirmative consent from the customer. Therefore, you need to establish trust and offer value before prompting your customer to receive notifications. It’s particularly important to approach notifications from a place of politeness, and have a holistic strategy across all messaging types and channels that the system uses to convey information.
  • The characteristics of helpful notifications:
    • They’re well-timed: In the old days, the worst notification was a phone call during dinner. Notifications should arrive at the right time for the customer to respond. 
    • They’re concise and clear: This goes for all communication, especially for alerts requiring action.
    • They’re personalised and relevant to the customer: Unless the notification is truly an emergency, use other forms of communication for general messages.
    • They deliver value and enable action: Notifications should only be used to alert the customer to something they need to take action on. Creating a sense of urgency when there’s no possible action just creates anxiety. No one needs more anxiety.
  • In general, the best onboarding is the least intrusive. Don’t focus on creating a delightful process that’s an experience in and of itself. Focus on getting the user to the value in a way that supports your business goals. Identify barriers to achieving value and what the customer needs to overcome them, whether it’s simple inline information, or hand-holding and encouragement throughout the process.
  • We designers demand creativity of ourselves, but don’t anticipate it in the people we design for. That’s a failure of imagination. Expecting that people will behave “correctly” is the path to fragile interactions.
  • How a machine responds to human error is the best test for its ability to mimic human intelligence—or at least to seem more human than cold, calculating machine. Precise calculations and dazzling displays of information retrieval are easy for machines, but supportive redirection? Not so much. Forgiveness may be divine, but it’s certainly not digital.
  • Matt Jones, interaction designer and author, coined the phrase “be as smart as a puppy,” to say designers should be “making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies”
  • Poka-yoke is the Japanese term for mistake-proofing in manufacturing. Poka-yoke designs are most common in machines and devices that are dangerous if used incorrectly. For example, no microwave will start unless the door is shut. The simplest poka-yoke in digital interaction is only allowing user input within boundaries. For example, by offering a menu of options rather than an open text input, you can mistake-proof an online form. It’s an excellent design principle to run through every possible scenario in which a customer might use a system as designed and yet end up harming themselves, like misspeaking or misspelling the names of their medications.
  • Interaction design begins in the mind of the customer, which means error prevention starts in the first moments of creating the awareness that any given system exists. Make sure you start with the right concept, one that matches the users’ mental model. You cannot control user expectations and associations, so you must understand them and look beyond your product to see what creates them. Assume everyone is on autopilot all the time, and that they’re drawing unconscious inferences from the barest of cues.
  • A voice that sounds too much like a person will set expectations too high.
  • Context makes the conversation – As interconnected digital systems endeavour to offer more “natural” ways of interacting through voice and text, the limitations of these systems, combined with the context of their use, can make interacting with them somewhat of a minefield. This leads to the sort of frustration intuitive interfaces are supposed to prevent. Being able to interact with a computer in the same way you text a friend or talk on the phone sets high expectations. Human and machine may be conversing, but they are not cooperating. Natural language processing requires the computing power to analyse and interpret human speech or text in real time. There’s no room for ambiguity. Before rushing to chat, consider whether it really will make life easier. Some of the drawbacks include:
    • Lack of context awareness: The systems can’t pick up on contextual cues that might be available to a human, and probing for information would cross over into uncanny valley.
    • Takes more time: The web has made self-service fast and satisfying for a wide variety of complex tasks. It’s easy to become habituated to speed. Talking through a task can feel agonisingly slow, much more so than clicking a button.
    • Unpredictable: Even the most intelligent system is vastly more limited than a human. It can be impossible to predict what options are available or what input is acceptable.
    • Not error-tolerant: Unexpected input can bring interactions to a halt with no path forward.
  • All customers will have slightly different needs and preferences; some want to take action before really understanding who they’re dealing with, while others are more careful before diving in. Avoid making assumptions about what users want in favour of understanding real-world contexts.

 

The power of personality

  • In life, every one of us manages to have a unique personality without even thinking about it. But imbuing a service with a personality requires a lot of thought. Creating and sustaining an appropriate and effective human voice within an interface requires effort and intention.
  • A personality is the consistent set of human characteristics embodied by your product, service, or organisation. While a brand is the sum of all the associations in the mind of your customer, the personality is how the system is designed to sound and behave. Voice and personality are often used as synonyms, but even a wordless interactive system may have a personality, as long as it displays or elicits emotions that are sufficiently human.
  • If you don’t craft a personality intentionally, one will be assigned by your customers, in their minds. And it won’t be as good and the one you create and control.
  • To make an emotional connection with people, you need to understand those people and what they’re emotionally connected to.
  • To create interfaces that are meaningful to actual humans who have no relationship to your company, you must listen to them. This means doing user research before starting the design work, and continuously as you create and refine your interface and personality.
  • You need to hear how real people talk about the specific services you provide, and how they talk about their day and see their problems. Your goal is to hear and understand what your users value and how they talk about it—not so you will mimic them, but so you will be intelligible to them. You must rid yourself of your internal phrasings and find new ones that seem natural to your users.
  • You need to understand their full range of potential emotional states and contexts, and acknowledge and anticipate the negative emotions.
  • Listen for their tasks, too, of course—those things they expect to use the system to do. You need to understand their goals and aspirations and how what you’re trying to do fits into their lives. How does interacting with your product or service help someone be the person they want to be? And how do you prove that this is the case?
  • In addition to just plain eavesdropping, conduct interviews and listen to your users’ language. Ask representative target customers about their typical day. Just be quiet, and let them speak. Do this a half-dozen times. Then go back through your notes and pull out all the nouns and verbs. This will tell you what your customers do, and the words they use to describe what they do. As you develop the personality and vocabulary for your interface, including labels and phrases for actions, use these notes as a reference. The goal isn’t to sound like a customer; your interface isn’t a peer. The goal is to be meaningful to your customer and trigger the right set of associations.
  • You can tell which products are made by organisations who talk about people, and those who talk about “eyeballs” and “uniques.” A cynical approach to people results in impersonal, system-centered design with a slick veneer of marketing.
  • You must care about them, or you can’t expect them to care about you.
  • You need clear values to create a personality with integrity. Values sound like something high-minded and abstract, something that calls on bureaucratic lyricism. But every business has a starter set. Values are implicit in the business model, and denote the exchange of value between the business and the customer. Unexamined values tend to come from an attitude of “we’re here to make money doing stuff.” This leads to a bland marketing tone that won’t stand out. And you can’t adopt values that run counter to how you make your money.
  • Defining and clarifying values is an activity that requires the input of key organisational stakeholders. And it must take place in the context of creating a living interaction between the system (representing the organisation) and the customers. Personalities go wrong when the people at the top write up a set of abstract core values or brand guidelines that eventually find their way to a design team where they must be interpreted into a living, interactive experience.
  • The important thing is that it’s a collaborative process subject to an open discussion, rather than something handed down from on high.
  • As the maxim goes, you are not the user—forgetting this is the path to a forgettable outcome.
  • If you focus on what you have to say before thinking about how you sound, you’ll have an easier time sounding right. Think of it as drawing the right style out of the subject matter rather than attempting to apply authenticity like a veneer.
  • When the personality of your system depends on language, and you have an international audience, it’s necessary to adapt that personality to the local language and culture. Simply translating for meaning won’t be effective.
  • At every point, in every role, your interface should come across as supportive and on the side of the customer, even during less positive interactions.
  • Begin with the mood and the state of mind of your customer.
  • Remember: If you have to say it, you probably aren’t it.
  • It all comes down to valuing your customer and knowing your values.

 

Getting it done

  • To create more conversational, human-centered systems, we need to work in a more conversational, human-centered way. This is a challenge because the way we do business is still largely driven by documentation and hierarchy. Doing business requires a certain amount of both.
  • The degree to which a system feels human and goal-oriented in its interactions reflects how well its creators interacted with each other.
  • A harmonious interface is the product of functional, interdisciplinary communication and clear, well-informed decision-making.
  • Systems with visible seams are the result of handoffs and unresolved arguments.
  • It’s clear when the legal team has taken ownership of a step in the sign-up process and everything grinds to a halt in a wall of text. An interface of overwhelming choices represents territory battles or general aimlessness. Indecipherable error messages indicate that the design team wrapped up and went on vacation right about the time the engineering team took over. Or that these essential parts of the interaction weren’t considered from the beginning.
  • “Process” is just a business word for habit, or an aspiration to develop that habit.
  • Creating a design process is just another type of interaction design. A group of people sharing a system need to behave a certain way and have access to the right information at the right time to get to a successful outcome.
  • Process change begins with a problem. If there’s no perceived problem, there will be no change. A more conversational design process will help solve a variety of problems that fall into two categories, wasting resources, and missing opportunities (which is just another kind of waste).
    • A lack of innovation: The greatest barrier to innovation is comfort with the current way of doing things. A process based in documents or artifacts makes it easy to keep repackaging familiar thinking in newer, shinier ways and still feel like you’re making progress. Stepping away from what you already know brings opportunities into view.
    • Confusing polish for value: Teams that aren’t comfortable communicating across traditional discipline divisions will have a strong urge to create a thing to demonstrate their value in the design process. Once an artifact exists, it’s easy to invest it with value and be unwilling to discard the weak idea it may represent.
    • A systems-oriented view: Agile and Lean approaches, at their core, offer ways to build software better, not solve problems for people and business. These processes risk conflating features with value—the faster the team builds and the more they build, doesn’t equate with the value they’re producing. The goal of conversational design, and any good design, is to create the most value with the fewest features. Just like it’s better to get the message across in the fewest words, and solve the problem in the simplest way. More thinking, less building.
    • The Tower of Babel: People cling to the language of their disciplines, business, engineering, writing, design. Humans love to do the in-group/out-group thing. Get people to talk together early and it makes everything clearer down the line. An organisation can’t solve a problem holistically if different groups are working from different information sets. Talking together is often a more effective way to share information than passing documentation around.
  • “Don’t believe the notion that IxD is over & we can just use patterns. Most software we use is still crappy because of concepts, not buttons.” —Alan Cooper via Twitter
  • Once you have the people in your organization working in a more immediate and conversational manner, you can introduce other process revisions. The big one is rethinking each phase of the interaction and interface design process with the aim of eliminating the reliance on specific artifacts or documentation as a proxy for design and understanding. For people raised on screens, or hooked on screens, it’s tempting to start drawing screens. As soon as you start drawing screens, you stop being truly human-centered. Rather than starting with sketches or blocking out shapes, try the ‘Concept-Script-Sketch’ model to ensure that your ideas and the pace of action are on target.
    • Concept: Every design needs to start with a strong concept, the big idea, the reason to exist. It doesn’t matter how delightful the surface styling is if the underlying idea is weak. And a strong idea can be device-independent or exist across multiple devices or modes of interaction. Next, move onto the script.
    • Script: This is the core of the interaction. Try working collaboratively all together in front of a whiteboard, or using whatever communication platforms feel most natural for your team. Something as simple as a text editor might be a good place to save ideas.
    • Sketch: Sketch the interface of the system that supports that exchange of information or meaning. Show how it fits into the larger context of the user’s life. This process will allow you to consider the same exchange of value through multiple channels and interfaces.
  • Step back even further from the MVP with the Minimum Meaningful Conversation, a lightweight way to think outside the system and see the value you purport to offer from your customer’s perspective.
  • The goal of early prototypes is to separate the polish of the production from the value of the idea. Because it’s easy to fall in love with and feel defensive about labor-intensive artifacts, even if they’re merely shiny vessels for weak ideas.
  • Talk about decisions over artifacts. Frame the design conversation around creating an experience and exchanging information in time, rather than laying out elements in space.
  • Never permit lorem ipsum. No placeholder language. Language and meaning belong at the center of the experience. Reinforce the idea that specific language is subject to continuous iteration and is a part of the design process. It’s not some parallel but different “writing” process.
  • Read aloud every word that’s intended to be part of the customer-facing design. This is an essential test for meaning and timing, and the only way to ensure that your interface works across modes in both text and speech. It will also lighten the weight and perceived permanence of anything seen as “the written word.”
  • Design is a practice. And significant change is something that happens incrementally over time with everyone involved contributing to the practice.
  • When you look at a problem you want to solve with design, look deep. Look past the surface to what it means—not to the components or code, but to the human beings.
  • Different approaches will work for different teams. The better you can cultivate direct, honest communication and respect, the more easily you’ll be able to collaborate to create meaningful interactions.
  • It’s exciting stuff working with interactive, interconnected design. Every year brings something that used to be the stuff of science fiction. I’m certain that in the near future, we’ll be able to control computers with our minds. Telepathy and telekinesis will become practical realities. And even these abilities won’t change anything fundamental about human nature.
  • Often the best way to start a conversation is with a question: What are we here to do?