I worked closely with the Google Assistant Auto engineering team to simplify conversations offering users multiple locations of retail chains when using voice search in Maps.

I designed a simple interaction framework to concatenate TTS to replace store names with pronouns and to vary sentence structures, in order to both humanize and shorten the interaction. I also left the team preliminary designs to expand the framework to experiment with category searches e.g. “Find a gas station.”

In the previous design, Assistant always used a static phrase including the store name and distance while zooming to the location in the map view. I did this following my analysis several dozen recorded user testing sessions. I also pulled several hundred recent destination search queries where the user abandoned the interaction.

In my design, after implicitly confirming the users request (“There’s a Starbucks…”) and zooming the map view, the Assistant would use different pronoun replacement variations (e.g. “There’s one” or “Another one”) and sentence structures (e.g. declarative vs. interrogative) to humanize and simplify the interaction.