[MUSIC PLAYING] 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.
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