Voice AI Assistant
Voicebox Technologies
Background Info
I was responsible for the user experience and interface design of an intelligent personal voice assistant that supports multi-user scenarios and voice biometrics, by integrating with the company’s flagship speech recognition technology. 20+ features were designed.
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I was responsible for designing Alarm, Biometrics Training, Clock, Food Delivery, Hands Free Dialing, Global Push to Talk, Tower Setup, Account Setup, Uber, Voicenote, Weather, User Profile, Mobile Companion App, and Global UX Rules.
The client's company's natural language speech recognition technology for smart TV required a clear vision on the experience it provides for users, since the product has not integrated with Smart TV yet. User experience was analyzed and a video demonstration was created. Tool used to create the demonstration was Powerpoint.
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Platforms: Speaker, iOS & Android phones
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The Team: 2 UX designers + Developers + Speech Scientists, PMs, Content Strategist
User Personas
The User Experience (UX) team conducted few user research activities which includes focus groups, interviews and surveys and the outcome helped us to develop the Xavier user personas. These personas will help all the teams to share a common understanding of our end user's capabilities, limitations, mental model, expectations and demographics. They're able to:
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- Provide a human "face" to create empathy for the persons represented by the demographics.
- Proposed solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas.
- Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of personas.
- Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
- We use the personas throughout the development lifecycle and we call it user centric design.
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When do we user personas?
- Brainstorming sessions
- Use case specification
- Features definition
- Interaction design
- Visual design
- Usability testing
- Quality assurance
 Primary User |  Average User |  Power User |
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 Challenged User |  Child User |
Alarm Feature
Site map
Reasons for Alarm
To understand the end users more vividly and personally, these visual collage were created for applicable scenarios based on research data
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Ways users can set interval alarms
The analysis was done to make this recommended technical approach for setting interval alarm feature.
Voice UI Flow Diagrams
Voice UI flow diagrams were created for each feature and scenario, to show user beginning to end interaction with the AI assistant, and all possible utterance categories and pathways.
Voice User Interface - VUI Flow Diagrams
By analyzing quantitate and qualitative research data, user and feature requirements were created. Following the requirements, VUI flow diagrams were created. The diagrams maps out the entire interaction process between user and device, and all possible pathways as well as system responses. Sets of VUI Flow Diagrams were created for all features.
 Turn off Alarm-no alarm specified.png |  Snooze single alarm-2.png |  Snooze multiple alarms.png |
|---|---|---|
 Disambiguation-time duration alarm.png |  Check inactive alarms.png |  Disambiguation - exceed maximum interval |
 Alarm fires with Radio Station.png |  alarm fires with music.png |  alarm fires with music_not available.png |
 alarm fires with music_not available-2.p |  2.1 Set recurring interval alarm_no deta |  2.2 Set recurring interval alarm by repe |
 2.4 Set recurring interval alarm by dura |  2.3 Set recurring interval alarm by end |  1.3 Set single interval alarm by duratio |
 1.0 Set interval alarm.png |  1.1 Set single interval alarm.png |  1.2 Set single interval alarm by repeat |
Supporting Mobile App - Alarm Feature
As part of the product design we were asked to design a companion mobile app that supports the speaker device experience. So I started by creating information architecture for the mobile alarm feature.
Visual Design for Home Page Experience
After wireframes are approved, then it's the visual design phase. I provided several design style options and this is the final one we went with. This is the home page experience after visual design application.
Multi-User Experience
In order to understand in depth multi-user interaction scenarios, user journey maps were created in brainstorm session. The journey maps helped to identify all multi-user scenarios, cross-user scenarios,  and overlapping user scenarios.
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Multi-User Experience
This is the interaction flow I created for the multi-user experience with visual design applied.
Clickable Mobile App Prototype
This is a clickable prototype showing the experience of creating multiple user profiles. Prototypes help to do usability testing, and help all stakeholders understand the contextual user experience.
On boarding new users
Part of the on-boarding process was training for biometric recognition, thorough user observations are done to understand how user behaves with audial instructions from the speaker device, and how to appropriately guide the use using sounds, color lights from device, and mobile application visuals. This is the mobile app visual guidance that works together with the device's audio guidance.
Other Features - Hands Free Dialing
Through understanding interview results on this feature, I created information architecture, and other supporting documents to help thoroughly understand user insights, and to be foundation for the VUI design.
Hands Free Dialing
Voice UI Flow Diagrams
 Redial.png |  Call Contact.png |  Dial a number.png |
|---|---|---|
 Bluetooth Connectivity check.png |  Making a call with no contact specificat |
Weather
Voice UI Diagrams for weather feature
 Weather VUI_Weather forecast for locatio |  Weather VUI_Weather forecast for Landmar |  Weather VUI_Forecast for a specific holi |
|---|---|---|
 Weather VUI_Sunrise_Sunset for specific |
Documentations
Detailed and clear documentations are essential part of communication between designers and PMs, it records the research, findings, insights, requirements, plans, and the design vision
User Research Plan
At each major milestone of the design process, user research or user testing was planned out based on scenarios and features. Focus groups, one-on-one sessions, and survey were conducted appropriately. This is an example user research plan that's done for later part of the product design. Which focuses on the sounds, lights, and setup process. The research results will assist with coming up with UX design flows.
