This course will introduce you to voice user interface (VUI) design as a human-centered design discipline.  Through readings, discussion, and in-class exercises, and the analysis of a speech interface of your choice, you will get a feel for what voice interaction design is, its limits, and the tradeoffs it entails when designing such a system.  You will begin to learn how to research and design a simple user interaction with a system via a VUI and have an idea how to iterate on it, then test, evaluate and tune one.

Explores the user-centered design paradigm from a broad perspective, emphasizing how user research and prototype assessment can be integrated into different phases of the design process. Students learn to think like a user-centered designer and carry out activities that are key to user-centered design.

I’ve been thinking about empathy and feelings a lot lately. Voice user interface (VUI) designers and linguists frequently observe that common sense ideas about language lead to misunderstanding about what we can and can’t do with our brains when it comes to talking and listening. Liz Jackson’s talk at Interaction ’19 got me thinking when she suggested that to check our bias we should question what is wholesome. As voice design reaches critical mass and becomes a primary interaction design discipline, this will become something every designer will need to consider. Starting with Dori Turnstall’s notion of respectful design, I will discuss how from a cognitive perspective the inversion of this is necessary when we approach voice interaction design.