Year: 2021

It was love at first listen.

A year ago at the start of 2020, I had just finished training for what would be the most challenging job in my career so far. Every day was high-stakes and every interaction had the potential of turning into a PR nightmare for the Big Tech Company I was representing. My role essentially fell between Call Center Operator and Account Manager. I made outbound calls upwards of 60 times a day, speaking to clients from all over the country and organizing their feedback to help drive some major decision-making.

What I loved was how even though I had to follow a general guideline for my calls (which later got converted into a script), every. single. call. was different. When you’re talking to someone new, there’s a million ways that conversation can go. Before dialing a client, I never knew what to expect. People are spontaneous and the people I called always had unique reactions to my rehearsed rambling.

The only time I could predict what’d happen next during a call was whenever I heard: “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.” Oof. Is it just me, or does that phrase make you cringe?

The more calls I made to higher profile businesses, the more I heard it. Those words absolutely haunted me and I started hearing them even in my dreams. Out of all the daily interactions I had, that one stood out to me because even though I couldn’t put it into words, something felt off about it.

One fateful day, a curious little video popped up in my YouTube recommendations… and it changed my life.

“Conversation is more than just the literal exchange of information.” — James Giangola

The Video

When I watched the entire 40 minutes of James Giangola’s 2017 Google I/O talk, I didn’t just fall in love with Conversation Design. I fell back in love with communication and writing.

I used to work as a Spanish interpreter. It was my duty to be the bridge between people to help both parties understand and cooperate with each other. If you’ve seen the video, then you know what I’m talking about. The Cooperative Principle is, in short, a key feature of all human interaction. We speak through our intentional choice of words as well as through our intent to have our words be relevant and make sense to the other party.

To be an interpreter under an agency, you are trained to know: the best kind of interpreter will opt to relay intended meanings over literal information. It could be as simple as realizing “it’s raining cats & dogs” shouldn’t be said exactly because it would make zero sense in another language, or as critical as identifying and conveying any underlying emotion. “What do you think?” spoken softly and with an inflection at the end is a whole ocean away from “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” in a sarcastic tone.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Back to the haunting IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Out of context, the words, “please listen carefully as our menu options have changed,” sound innocent. Literally, it’s supposed to be helpful like, “Hey, if you’ve heard our previous call menu, the option you may have used before might be under a different category.” In context, it doesn’t operate well under the Cooperative Principle. It violates the maxim of quantity by being repetitive (every time you call they start with the same message) and verbose. Finally, proof that I wasn’t just being overly-sensitive at IVRs!

Giangola’s talk delves into what makes for unnatural sounding Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) and how to optimize them. When people get upset that their Virtual Assistant doesn’t understand them, it’s usually because they expect a natural conversational interaction that operates under all 4 maxims. People don’t want to be told how to talk (a mistake a lot of VUIs continue to make, unfortunately), or given ambiguous 2-in-1 prompts (e.g. “You can make a payment with MasterCard or Visa. So, would you like to pay now?” — wayyy too much information there in one breath), and they especially don’t want unnecessary PSA’s on how the menu options are always changing!

It simply blew my mind that there was an actual career devoted to making machines talk to humans more fluently. I couldn’t believe people worked on this all day! While I definitely enjoyed my day job (and was good at it too: I was voted Top Operator of the Month twice!), I couldn’t help but daydream about creating my own conversational flows.

The Honeymoon Phase

I was smitten. Every day I’d wake up, smiling and excited to keep working down my list of video recommendations (basically, tons of Cathy Pearl), or keep digging around Google Search for as many articles as possible.

As far as the basics, I knew Conversation Design was a relatively unknown and nascent field, but I did intentionally sneak in some UX design since designing conversational experiences for users, kind of relies on those principles. Just a little. I found websites like Laws of UX and books like Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited extremely helpful for a newbie like me. I can’t forget, of course, the most recommended reading for newcomers to the space: Designing Voice User Interfaces by Cathy Pearl herself.

All of that wasn’t enough. I felt like I needed to know more, and running free and directionless on the internet just wasn’t giving me any structured learning I could build upon. Cue my addiction to webinars.

One month into the pandemic, I realized I could take advantage of events moving online. The first of the kind that caught my eye were botmock webinars, specifically because they were targeted for people trying to get into the field, with little or no previous experience. The first couple of times, I remember being so incredibly nervous I didn’t even know what to ask. I’d play them on the background like a podcast and hope that the knowledge would just seep in my brain through some kind of vocal osmosis. One session in particular helped me with a mere mention of a blog post.

The post in question is this Ultimate List of Conversation Design courses, which continues to be my go-to resource for anyone who asks me how to formally get started. I ventured in immediately. I started out with UX for Voice: Planning and Implementation which gave me a general picture of where the field was in terms of design strategy and tools. Then I moved onto The Voice Course: UX, UI, Strategy & Design (which appears to no longer be accepting students as of Jan 2021) which opened my eyes to the bigger application of Conversational AI. I got a preview of Voice Technology in the automobile industry and IoT applications. Suddenly, I realized the depth and reach of Voice beyond your average home smart speaker.

Everything seemed shiny and new. I was in love with this field, I knew that for sure, but I didn’t dare yet take the leap in calling myself a Conversation Designer. I had the foundational knowledge, but no practical knowledge. Not yet at least. It took joining Women in Voice Global (an AMAZING organization!) and a webinar (yep, you guessed it, a Botmock webinar) for me to finally take the plunge and commit myself into this career shift.

The Commitment

First comes love, then comes marriage. The art of marrying theory and practice in Conversation Design is simple, but oh-so-very-difficult to execute. In the beginning, my own prompts and flows were pretty basic. And by basic, I mean incomplete.

I knew how to write an onboarding with personality and still keep it concise, but I kept getting lost in error handling. I got so tied up in designing an entire persona for my chatbot that I’d forget to make it useable, and capable of handling human interjections.

“I got so tied up in designing an entire persona for my chatbot that I’d forget to make it useable[.]”

It was only until I got the chance to really dive hands-in to a real, working prototype that I finally learned my lesson of usability.

My team won 3rd place in a #VoiceFirst Designathon competition hosted by Botmock and VoiceDevs in August 2020 (I’m not even sorry for all the promo; their resources really helped me out). You can read more about our process here, but to sum it up in a few words: users come first. Regardless of how many fun features we wanted to put into our voice app, we had to stay grounded and write how the average user of our app would normally speak, not how they would speak in ideal scenarios.

From then on, my designs really started maturing. I’d spend less time in making things sounds pretty and instead focus on making them simple and repeatable. I experimented. I dug into the tech behind the magic curtain that powers Conversational AI by building my own basic chatbot using Rasa SDK. I signed up for Voiceflow, studied UI design with Sketch and Figma, and more. Finally, the pieces were all starting to come together.

The next step was a huge one. In November 2020, I signed up to be part of the very first cohort for Voice Tech Global’s Advanced Conversational Experience Design Course. A key aspect of being a value-bringing Conversation Designer is the ability to convert feedback and user-data into adaptive and successful iterations of your conversational product. Another crucial skill Conversation Designers need is to be able to collaborate seamlessly in a cross-team setting. Conversation Designers are very rarely solo operators. Their work relies on engineering, data analysis, UX/UI design, and more. That’s ultimately what convinced to enroll: I’d get a hands-on approach to the material and have a chance to collaborate in real-time with other designers.

The coursework exceeded my expectations. Not only did I create my own voice experience prototype from ideation and research to testing, I was also given the opportunity to present my case study to a panel of industry leaders. Despite being the youngest in the cohort, I did not shy away from the chance of putting my own voice out there (see what I did there?). The knowledge I gained from Voice Tech Global truly helped me fortify what I already knew and take it up a notch by applying it into an enterprise-level context.

The Future

The Speech and Voice Technology industry is estimated to be worth $26.8 billion by 2025. There’s a lot of opportunity still to be had and a lot of design work yet to be done. As for me, I’m ready to be a part of it, long-term.

In fact, I’m proud to announce that I will be soon joining NLX on their Voice Compass adventure as a Conversational UX Designer! Stay tuned. There’s more learning and achievements to come!

Got this far? I have some goodies for you.

If you’re interested in breaking into Conversation Design, then I’d HIGHLY recommend you sign up for the 2021 Conversation Design Summit, hosted by Botmock. On March 1st and 2nd, several of the top industry practitioners will reveal their Conversation Design process and give you helpful frameworks and worksheets to try out yourself!

Get 10% off your ticket price, with the promo code: ELAINE

Still here? Well, guess what.

You can also get a 5% discount on Voice Tech Global’s Advanced CXD course, with my referral! DM me through any of the contact links below and I’d be glad to help you out.

Want to read more about the work I’ve done? Check out my portfolio! I’m happy to answer any questions that come in through my contact form 🙂

Also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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My Journey into Conversation Design was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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The year 2020 has been a rough one, but this hasn’t stopped new ideas from emerging and making their way. Especially when talking about new social networks and connectivity tools. The same applies to the new social media developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur P. Davison and ex-Google employee R. Seth.

This brand new social media platform, Clubhouse, wants to change the way people talk. Rather than share text, users can openly communicate by sharing voice recordings. Company founders believe that Clubhouse will allow people everywhere to be more open. They will be able to tell stories, develop ideas, and meet new friends.

New types of social platforms seem to appear every day. This one is different, though. Instead of text posts, users share audio clips.

What exactly is the Clubhouse?

In this social network, real-time audio brings you a completely new way to interact with other members of the Clubhouse. The audio is your only means of communication.

Besides this, it is like any other social platform. It’s where you can connect with new friends, enrich your network, tell stories — and even perform.

But most of all, discuss in-depth the issues that interest you most and ask questions. You can also learn and listen to conversations on thousands of different topics, and from all over the world!

For what’s inside Clubhouse, a description of their own words can be more accurate:

What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is a new type of network based on voice. When you open the app you can see “rooms” full of people talking. All open so you can hop in and out, exploring different conversations. You enter each room as an audience member, but if you want to talk you just raise your hand, and the speakers can choose to invite you up. Or you can create a room of your own. -A description from Paul and Rohan on their blog post.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Clubhouse meaning and history

The Clubhouse platform launched in March 2020. It came after a series of experimentation and attempts on other social products. Products that mostly failed or were shut down, from both founders.

As for the Clubhouse meaning, their intention, as they would write in their blog, is the following:

Our goal was to build a social experience that felt more human-where instead of posting, you could gather with other people and talk… something where you could close the app at the end of the session feeling better than you did when you opened it. Paul, Rohan and the Clubhouse team — January 24 2021 Article

We can say that they have reached pretty much the initial goal they had, and intend to spread it to the entire world.

Month after month, after the launch, the number of users keeps increasing. Even if the platform works with an invite-only system.

But this didn’t stop thousands of people from trying to join the platform. A desire fed mostly by the fact that many public figures had joined.

VIP members like celebrities, Hollywood actors, famous musicians, and Entrepreneurs. Also, Investors, Venture capitalists, and Real Estate agents have joined the platform. During the last months, it was also joined by athletes, comedians, authors, and scientists.

How to get a Clubhouse invite?

For those who want a Clubhouse invite, you need to have the right connections. If you don’t have contact with someone already inside the platform, it might be hard.

However, something you can try is to find people around offering them. Doing a search on different social media can be fruitful. There are a lot of posts offering clubhouse invites for free or in exchange for a follow, even if it’s not right.

An easy way, for example, is to find the tweet Elon Musk made about him participating in an open conversation inside a Clubhouse room.
This caused a boom of retweets from a lot of people offering invites.

From 0 to 6 Million

According to the latest data, the app crossed 6 million registered users on February 1.

According to this study, most of the members have joined the platform during the last 3 months. This is why the growth trajectory forms a 90𝇈 angle.

After the app issued 20 invites to each Testflighter the number of the members started rising exponentially.

It was mid-January when the platform reached its first million and kept on rising. There were several factors that contributed to this immense global request to join the app.

There was another factor in addition to high profile figures from the business community. The fact that many people started investing in it. Investing to be part of the company but also as influencers. By using their own social media, skyrocketed the fame of this new social media platform.

There are two events worth mentioning to have helped this radical growth:

– The Clubhouse Lion King Production

All eyes were on Clubhouse on Dec. 26 for the premiere of “The Lion King” musical, as it came to Clubhouse in a real-time performance. For all those who joined, Clubhouse gave the users a complete musical experience.

Complete with a 40-member cast, along with a choir and live instrumentation. This all concluded with a tweet made by the director of the performance, which had been commented on for a few days in a row.

But this would not be the only performance executed through this platform. There were a lot of other “rooms” doing similar activities.

– A single tweet from Elon Musk

Elon Musk is known, time after time, to support new startups, and his words make a great impact.

The same thing happened with the Clubhouse app.
On January 31 he made a single tweet about him participating in a Clubhouse event called Good Time.

This caused a storm of retweets and new tweets. Many of them confirming their presence and most of all offering free invites to join the app.

As of February 1, the app registered more than 6 Million registered users, and the number kept increasing. The number of people registering was so big it caused the app to crash on the morning of February 2.

High investment does not mean no issues

Since March 2020, this new social media platform has attracted the attention of many investors. High capital investors and venture capitalists.

Different sources confirm that Clubhouse, on its first round of funding, raised capital from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). $10 million in primary funds and at least $2 million in secondary shares.

The deal was said to value the company at or just above $100 million.

Second round

After 8 months from its first round of investments, the social network Clubhouse said that it raised a new round of funding. Again from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Money it plans to use to improve the platform. For example, introduce paid features, and set up a grant program where popular users will get paid.

Yet, none of them has made an official statement on the latest developments. Only the fact that they now have over 180 investors from different backgrounds.

It is believed that the Clubhouse has a $1 billion valuation in less than a year. This value came after receiving more than $100 million of investments.

But there are still issues to solve

The great number of investments surely will help improve the platform and offer a better experience for its users.

However, Clubhouse has more urgent issues to solve. Issues that even huge social platforms like Facebook or Twitter have difficulties with.

Something that they would address directly in one of their communications:

“This past week, people on Clubhouse have hosted several intense conversations on topics of identity, ethnicity, gender, racism, and religion. These conversations led to a number of serious incident reports, and we received questions and concerns from our community about how we plan to scale safety and moderation on Clubhouse.”

The Clubhouse has received a lot of criticism. Aimed for its lack of adequate harassment protocols and inability to handle complaints.

This along with people saying that the moderation process should be more stringent.

Even if this communication was made nearly 4 months ago.

Their plans for the future

As for the incident reports, Clubhouse has made a clear response against these acts. This is what they announced through a previous official communication:

– First, we unequivocally condemn Anti-Blackness, Anti-Semitism, and all other forms of racism, hate speech and abuse on Clubhouse.
– People who violate them are warned, suspended, or removed completely from the platform, depending on the severity of the offense.

Along with these acts of improvement, they have announced their intentions to improve other things.

Their intention is not to only improve the in-app experience. They also intend to expand the reach of their platform. This helped from the last round of investments.

– Increased accessibility

One of their objectives is to make the platform available for Android users. This considering the fact that the app momentarily is available only for IOS users.

On the other side, they intend to add more localized features so every user can have a more native experience.

– Performance & Personalization

Their investment in advanced technologies will bring a more performant in-app experience. They will also improve the personalization of how the users can discover people, rooms, and clubs by making it adaptive to their interests.

– Creator Grant Program

The Clubhouse creators are the backbone of the platform. They will be supported in the future through a payment system. This will be a way for them to be recognized for their effort. It will be made possible through features like tipping, tickets, or subscriptions.

This will certainly motivate the existing ones to become more active and aim for quality and invite new ones over.

– Customer Support

As the platform grows, Clubhouse intends to raise its efforts towards user safety. This means increasing the Support and Trust & Safety teams along with improving the tools for abuse prevention.

As for the invite-only joining mode of the platform, there is nothing to do but wait. Wait till Clubhouse becomes available for everyone. The Clubhouse has already claimed to make the platform available for Android users soon.

Considering this, there are high chances for the app to become available for everyone within this year.

Clubhouse app as a voice first social platform

The thing that makes Clubhouse special is the fact that the only way you have to communicate with other people is by using your voice. And this is how it will always be.

No text, no photos, no videos. Voice recordings only.

Of course, using voice is available in other platforms too, but for Clubhouse, voice is their DNA.

Some people even consider it as a live, podcast exchanging platform.

Voice technologies and their potential in social networking

Reconsidering everything that happened during 2020, we can say that voice has taken large importance. From smart speakers and voice assistants to voice-assisted services and high investment in voice first platforms.

The voice, not only for being a simple communicating tool but also a way to transmit emotion and character with each voice recording.

The voice trend & the future

The trend of voice will continue to disrupt and revolutionize not only the social networking industry. It has already changed many operations in business internal and external processes, customer service, and education.

This is the main reason why many investors in voice technologies have joined the platform lately.

Not only to explore this new platform. It is also a way for them to discuss and share ideas.

It all started as a way to facilitate everyday actions. Now every company has started to understand the importance of voice.

We are using them every day and more through voice assistants and smart speakers. Along with text-to-speech services, chatbots, online chats, and social media.

Clubhouse potential to change the use of voice in Social Media

Silicon Valley is one of the world’s most entrepreneurial hubs. This is where products are constantly changing and innovating. For them, Social media apps have served as both failure examples and the source of value creation.

The Clubhouse platform surprised everyone with its explosive growth and collection of investors. But this happened for a specific reason.

As Jeremiah Owyang describes it on his article:

“Text is not enough, and video is too much; social audio is just right. It represents the opportunity for social connection and empathy without the downsides of video.”

During the last years, many companies have tried launching a voice-only app or web platform. Yet, none of them has dealt with it as Clubhouse has done.

Starting as a private project, it found what people were looking for. A way of communicating without the uncomfortable part of showing on video or the hassle of writing everything.

A leap to new business opportunities

The success of Clubhouse as a voice first social media has created space for new uses of social audio. It does not hold only the significance of making voice more important.

It has planted the seed and given the chance to grow to a whole new level of product categories and business models.

In the future, we will start to see more and more companies offering social audio analytics, software, services, and management systems.

If more voice-oriented social platforms start to grow, it will create new ways to monetize services like premium options. Unique audio/text ads & ad-free experience, voice brands, promotion & sponsoring, and voice data analytics.

Also, the chance for the talented ones to become voice influencers.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Clubhouse Invite and More: A Non-Definitive Guide was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I remember before the pandemic, my friends and I would sometimes jokingly and other times not so jokingly, swap phones and Swipe for one another on dating apps. We mostly used Bumble and hinge.
I thought it would be interesting to make this possible even when there’s a pandemic happening. In other words: have a feature that allows friends to swipe for one another and matchmake. I decided to test how this feature would present itself in Bumble as it is one of the most popular dating apps on the market.

Disclaimer

This feature was designed independently from bumble and purely for the purpose of exploration. I do not own any rights to the existing mobile application. I utilized screenshots from the internet and my own phone and put together these wireframes on using Figma. The entire process took about 2 working days to complete (brainstorming, user flows and wireframing). This was developed and conceptualized during the covid 19 pandemic.

So What’s the issue and Who is this designed for?

Including friends’ feedback when swiping on dating apps is difficult when it’s not possible to gather. Sharing potential matches via screenshots can take too long at times. Having friends be able to swipe for you makes the process much more interactive, fun and less time consuming.

I designed Bumble wings to cater to those who have some trouble and difficulties putting themselves out there and utilizing the dating apps.
Someone like Carrie.

User Flow and Wireframing

I used the user flows as a guideline rather than a strict succession of tasks, seeing as I was going to manipulate and make these flows fit within an existing application. I did not want to overcomplicate them at this stage because I wanted to have room for flexibility and adaptation to the existing user flows of the mobile app

The initial Sketches helped me better visualize what kind of features and buttons I need for every page before diving into the final graphics of it. I had a pretty clear idea of what the screen would look seeing as I was building off an existing product and only sketched out some essential parts of the wireframes before building them from the existing bumble interface and wireframes.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Final Screens

Wings can swipe to match or classify some profiles as Maybees to allow the user to decide whether or not they want they want to swipe right on them.
Wing privileges can be revoked at any time.
The + button (in yellow) allows the user to add as many Wings as they like.

If a match is done by a Wing, then a small Icon of the Wing who matched the user will appear near the photo of the match. The user can also access the Maybee list- also chosen by Wings.

Maybees are profiles the Wings recommend to the user but leave it up the user to decide if they want to match with them or not. A photo of the Wing is shown near the profile of the Maybee for reference.

Maybees can be viewed in swipe view or in queue view (similar to the existing beeline feature in bumble).

If a Wing sees a profile that might be a match for a friend, they can click on the bee icon to match or Maybee the profile for someone they are winging for.
A search field comes up where the Wing can look up anyone they are winging for and match the profile for them.
Alternatively, they can swipe for a friend directly from BumbleWings as opposed to finding matches from their personal queues. The photo of the person they are winging for is in the upper left hand corner.
Swipe left for no, Right for yes and swipe upwards to Maybee

You can see the full case study with the low fidelity wireframes and ideas for future iterations on my website by clicking here

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Bumble Wings- A UX Proposal was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.