Understanding and Supporting Designers and Educators in Industry VUI Design
Graduate Research (University of Toronto, Sep 2017 - Present)
Project Summary
- Explored the design of conversational voice interfaces, and how researchers can support designers through research translation and creation of tools and frameworks tp improve conversational voice interaction
- Explored how GUI heuristics can be used as a baseline to adapt and develop new VUI-based heuristics that can be adopted by industry designers
- Conducted cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluations, and brainstorming sessions with user interface experts to brainstorm different types of existing VUI issues in Google Home and Amazon Echo, and to brainstorm potential new guidelines
- Lead end-to-end mixed-methods research with UX designers investigating how designers create and evaluate conversational and voice-based AI experiences
- Conducted large-scale surveys and qualitative studies with UX practitioners to identify workflows, challenges, and unmet needs in conversational AI and voice interface design.
Goal
To understand and support both industry designers and educators/trainers in designing emerging interfaces such as Voice User Interface design, and help new and existing designers transition from traditional GUI design to designing for new and developing emerging interfaces and interaction paradigms
1. Conducted four-phase participatory workshops with 10 GUI-trained Usability Experts exploring existing GUI heuristics and brainstorming VUI heuristics
2. Conducted Scoping Scan and Syllabi Meta-Review of 25 International HCI Departments, exploring VUI design education
3. Surveyed 106 UX Designers in large scale online questionnaire about Practices, Tools and Barriers, to Industry VUI Design
Resulting Publications:
- Christine Murad and Cosmin Munteanu. 2020. Designing Voice Interfaces: Back to the (Curriculum) Basics. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376522
- Christine Murad and Cosmin Munteanu. 2020. Alexa, How Do I Build a VUI Curriculum? In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 15, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3405755.3406137
- Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Benjamin R. Cowan, and Leigh Clark. 2021. Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3469595.3469617
- Christine Murad, Humaira Tasnim, and Cosmin Munteanu. 2022. “Voice-First Interfaces in a GUI-First Design World”: Barriers and Opportunities to Supporting VUI Designers On-the-Job. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 17, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543829.3543842