Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design

Conference

Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Benjamin R. Cowan, L. Clark
International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 2021

ACM Link

Cite

APA Click to copy
Murad, C., Munteanu, C., Cowan, B. R., & Clark, L. (2021). Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design. In International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Murad, Christine, Cosmin Munteanu, Benjamin R. Cowan, and L. Clark. “Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design.” In International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 2021.

MLA Click to copy
Murad, Christine, et al. “Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design.” International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 2021.

BibTeX Click to copy

@conference{christine2021a,
  title = {Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces},
  author = {Murad, Christine and Munteanu, Cosmin and Cowan, Benjamin R. and Clark, L.}
}

Abstract

As Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) become widely popular, designers must handle new usability challenges. However, compared to other established domains such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), VUI designers have fewer resources (training support, usability heuristics, design patterns) to guide them. On the other hand, GUI-trained designers may also be solicited upon to design VUIs given the increased demand for such interfaces. This raises the question: how can we best support such designers as they transition from GUI to VUI design? To answer this, we focus on usability heuristics as a key resource, and conduct several workshops with GUI design experts, exploring how they map their design experience onto VUI design. Based on this, we suggest that the “path of least resistance” to transitioning designers from GUI to VUI may be the adaptation of familiar resources and concepts (such as GUI heuristics) to the VUI design space, instead of the imposition of novel VUI-specific heuristics on GUI-trained designers. This finding can inform the development of design resources that can support the increase demand for VUIs.