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Designing better voice interfaces for everyday life
What an ethnographic study has to say about voice user interfaces in homes
You understand the guidelines for voice user interfaces (VUIs). Maybe you have created several systems yourself. You have done many evaluations in controlled environments. But, what you probably don’t know yet is how people interact with VUIs inside their homes.
Porcheron and colleagues were interested to find out so they installed Amazon Echo with Alexa in five houses. They’ve recorded conversations around its use for a month, then applied ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They report their findings in a research paper presented at CHI, the top human-computer interaction conference. In this article, I share the key insights from the study and my analysis of the implications to design.
Intertwined with ongoing activities
Homes are inherently multi-activity settings in which devices get recruited into and are regulated through the ongoing cooperative and collocated activities. — Porcheron et al., Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life
When creating interactions with VUIs, we imagine users focusing on the task at hand. They would be standing in front of the smart speaker when they say the wake up word followed by the request. We then expect them to wait attentively for the response. This is not always the case.
Researchers observed many instances where the user is distracted. That is, they are simultaneously attending to other activities and interacting with family members. For example, a mother might be instructing the voice assistant to recite a recipe as she cooks, then stopping midway to scold her son for running around the kitchen.
Always on, always listening is thus a good design feature that makes switching between tasks easy. The smart speaker is continuously available via the wake word, and can be initiated through casual talk within the hustle and bustle of domestic life.
