Designing for Voice 101
Let’s look at the voice design principles that are needed to build engaging Alexa Skills.
We'll cover the following...
Designing applications for voice requires a totally different design approach. In this section, we’ll look at some of the design principles needed to ensure our Alexa Skill is engaging for customers.
Designing for conversation
Let’s look at some of the characteristics of human-to-human conversation.
Human conversational partners can:
- Construct meaning based on shared context.
- Evolve the data sets upon which they draw.
- Converge on increased understanding of each other’s intentions.
- Remember novel information beyond a given conversation.
Our whole goal for building voice applications is to give users the same kind of natural experience that they would expect if they were talking to an actual human. Being able to achieve the characteristics described above is what makes designing voice applications challenging!
People are embracing voice-first interfaces because, when done well, they are natural, conversational, and user-centric. To design great voice-first applications, we need to imagine the whole application using voice-first principles as our guide. Do not try to force a GUI-based experience into a voice-first paradigm. For example, don’t make an Alexa Skill that reads out stuff from a website. Apps that apt voice-first paradigms later in development tend to not align ...