Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice

323 Pages·2021·9.2 MB·English

by  Diana Deibel, Rebecca Evanhoe, Kat Vellos

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around C
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you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can N
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be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased.
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Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations A
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that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves O
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to be understood, especially you.

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T
H
“Deibel and Evanhoe teach conversation design using practical, actionable examples, and in

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such a way that it’s a delight to read—not just another book that feels like homework.” H
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CATHY PEARL N
Author of Designing Voice User Interfaces G
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“Witty in tone and full of real-life examples, Conversations with Things thoroughly covers the topic y

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of conversation design from the basics of prompt-writing to the complexities of multimodal I
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interactions. I highly recommend this book for experts and novices alike.” N
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LISA FALKSON D
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Senior VUI Designer, Amazon
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“Conversations with Things is a wonderful resource for designers working with voice. Through- L
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out the book, Diana and Rebecca lay out a good foundation for designers to create inclusive and n
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accessible conversations.” R
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REGINE GILBERT B
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Author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World, designer and educator C
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“The UX community finally has a comprehensive but easy-to-read guide to navigate the
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nuanced and sometimes messy process of conversation design.”
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MARK C. WEBSTER H
Director ofVoice and Audio Products, Adobe O
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Cover Illustration by Jason Kernevich l Interior Illustrations by Olivia Reaney-Hall
CONVERSATIONS WITH THINGS
www.rosenfeldmedia.com ISBN 978-1-933820-26-2 90000> UX Design for Chat and Voice
MORE ON CONVERSATIONS WITH THINGS by DIANA DEIBEL and REBECCA EVANHOE
https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/conversations-with-things/ 9781933820262
Foreword by Kat Vellos

CONVERSATIONS WITH THINGS
UX DESIGN FOR CHAT AND VOICE
Diana Deibel
Rebecca Evanhoe
NEW YORK 2021
This is a book that everyone even remotely connected with market-
ing and customer service should read, regardless of whether you’re
a budding conversation designer or not.
—Kane Simms, CEO and Co-Founder, VUX World
This is a must-read for anyone looking to get started or dive deeper
into conversational design. It was thought-provoking and inspira-
tional! I loved how this book addressed a critical need for discussion
around diversity, bias, and accessibility.
—Noelle Silver, Founder, AI Leadership Institute
Thoroughly researched and peppered with valuable inputs from
industry experts, the authors tackle conversation design topics from
the basics of prompt-writing to the intricacies of designing for acces-
sibility. I can give no greater praise than this: I learned a lot, and
enjoyed every minute of this book!
—Lisa Falkson, Senior VUI Designer, Amazon
Conversations with Things is a solid, practical introduction to the nuts
and bolts of designing for bots.
—Kim Goodwin, author of Designing for the Digital Age
As conversational interfaces continue to become a part of our daily
lives, more and more of the UX community are faced with the
challenge of designing conversations. Thankfully, they now have
this book to help them run a successful design process. With this
book, the UX community finally has a comprehensive but easy-to-
read guide to navigate the nuanced and sometimes messy process
of conversation design.
—Mark C. Webster, Director of Voice and Audio Products, Adobe
Deibel and Evanhoe lay out best practices for conversation design
using practical, actionable examples, and do it in such a way that it’s
a delight to read.
—Cathy Pearl, author of Designing Voice User Interfaces
Conversations with Things is a wonderful resource for designers
working with voice. Throughout the book, Diana and Rebecca lay
out a good foundation for designers to create inclusive and accessible
conversations.
—Regine Gilbert, author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World,
designer and educator
Conversations with Things
UX Design for Chat and Voice
By Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
125 Maiden Lane
New York, New York 10038
USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com
Please send errata to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Interior Layout: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Illustrator: Olivia Reaney-Hall
Indexer: Marilyn Augst
Proofreader: Sue Boshers
©2021 Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-26-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-933820-26-2
LCCN: 2021931003
Printed and bound in the United States of America
DIANA
To Q—now you tell the story
REBECCA
To everyone who contributed labor
and insight to this book
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Who Should Read This Book?
Everyone who helps create conversational interfaces should read this.
Whether you design them, build them, or just think about them, this
book shows how to design with humans in mind for better usability,
adoption, and impact. 
For conversation designers, new and established: This book is our
love letter to you. We are confident that you will see your own ideas
reflected here, learn new perspectives and techniques, and—best of
all—disagree with us and forge your own perspective. 
For anyone in a design role (UX, UI, visual, interaction, product,
experience, service, and industrial): This book is for you, too. Many
of you are peeking over the fence to see what’s going on with conver-
sational tech, and you’ll be happy to see good design processes and
ethical practices that you’re familiar with.
For anyone else on a conversational product team—developers, PMs,
data scientists, strategists, and business stakeholders—this book is
meant to help anyone who picks it up understand why conversation
design is a little bit strange and a lot different from screen design.
We could go on. If you’re curious about conversation design, join
in, all you linguists, poets, fiction and screenwriters, content strate-
gists, UX writers, information architects, AI ethicists, and so on. We
wrote this book so that anyone could flip it open, have their minds
expanded, and enjoy the ride. 
What’s in This Book?
This book has a lot in it: anecdotes, frameworks, pithy tweets,
documentation examples, tips for dealing with real constraints,
research, quotes, and quippy asides. But every bit of it is designed
to give you concrete, actionable information to take into your work.
This field is still somehow new-feeling, continuously reinventing
itself, shifting and growing, and this book serves as a record of
where things stand today. You’ll find many different perspectives
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and future extrapolations, and even some head-to-head debates from
us. The idea is to give you fodder to form your own opinions while
leaving a breadcrumb path to vetted methods of approaching AI
conversations.
What Comes with This Book?
This book’s companion website ( rosenfeldmedia.com/books/
conversations-with-things/) contains a blog and additional content.
The book’s diagrams and other illustrations are available under a
Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and
include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at
www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/.
How to Use This Book vii
FREQUENTLY ASKED
QUESTIONS
What do you mean by “conversations with things”?
This book is about designing for conversational interfaces—any
technology that people talk to, whether they’re speaking out loud to
it or typing. Think of things like voice assistants and chatbots, or any
interface where conversation is the primary input or output.
We call these interactions between people and talking technology
conversations with things to emphasize that while they mimic person-
to-person exchanges, these computerized conversational partners
aren’t people. There’s a rundown of these technologies (and a whole
bunch of useful definitions) in Chapter 1, “Why Conversation Design?”
Does my conversational product need a
personality?
A great question, and one that’s hotly debated. Short answer: Yes.
People will perceive a personality no matter what, so you want to
be intentional in how you design it. We say that the primary job of a
personality is to serve the user and the goals of the interaction. But
other considerations, like gender and race, carry a lot of weight. You
can see our framework for designing a personality in Chapter 3,
“Crafting Trustworthy Personalities.”
How do I document my designs for a
conversational interface?
Whoo boy. This a conversation we’ve had with a lot of people and
teams. Our overarching viewpoint is to work with your team to
figure out that documentation sweet spot: enough, but not too
much. To be more concrete, we advocate for flow diagrams as an
essential conversation design tool (but any form of documentation
has its pros and cons.) Read all about it in Chapter 6, “Documenting
Conversational Pathways.”
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