Ask a Conversation Designer
Got a question?
Email AskACXD@gmail.com (let me know if you’d like me to use your real name or not)
How do Conversation Designers prove business value to their company?
One of the key aspects of growing and scaling a Conversation Design team is proving business value to the company. How do you go about setting KPIs for a conversation design team? What kind of KPIs have you seen to be most effective?
How much does a Conversation Designer earn?
The truth is, there’s no magic answer/formula. It depends on many factors. But I’ll talk you through some of them, and provide some guidance on how to approach salary negotiations.
I'm an engineer. How do I show my skills as a Conversation Designer?
I'm currently an NLP Engineer at a startup but I've mainly worn the Conversation Design hat over the years and had less to do with tech and engineering (before I even knew that CD was a thing!). I'm wanting to transition to a CD role full time but I'm having a hard time…
Are there ways as a conversation designer to work on social and structural issues?
I’m a linguistics student who is very interested in the social aspects of language and structural issues like racism and accentism.
I want to pursue a career in conversation design but I wonder if there are career paths in CxD concerned with those problems. If so, what are some recommended resources?
How do you measure how well your designs are performing?
Just as the UX design discipline conducts audits to identify opportunities for optimization or refactoring of user experiences through heuristic analysis, how does this methodology translates to the field of voice? Example: how would you run an assessment for timers and alarms…
What's the best way to "hand off" design?
Do you think the concept of a hand-off (like a UI spec implemented by an engineering team) makes sense for conversation design? If so, do "static" materials like scripts and tree diagrams work well or is something more sophisticated and dynamic required?
What are some best practices for using voice authentication?
I am researching best practices to incorporate voice ID (voice biometrics/authentication) technology into a call center. Curious if you had any insights, best practices, etc. relating to the topic from a user experience standpoint?
Who should guide the conversation--the bot or the person?
In the course of my master's thesis, I had the opportunity to analyze a series of conversations between Alexa and humans. I noticed that Alexa imposes some guidance in the course of the conversation, effectively leaving little freedom for the humans to continue the conversation as they prefer. This forced guidance of the bots…
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What is conversation design?
The term “conversation design” is relatively new. When I started in this industry, the more common terms were “voice user interface design” or “dialog design”.
So, what changed? For one thing, we’re building experiences that are no longer only using voice as an input. Conversational user interfaces may be voice-only, text-only, or (as is becoming more common), multimodal.
In a multimodal conversation…
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How do I become a conversation designer?
This is one of the most frequently asked questioned I get! In fact, I wrote an article about it in 2019. But if you’re looking for something a bit shorter, start here.
First off, there is no one true path to becoming a conversation designer. I know people who come from engineering backgrounds, linguistics, and graphic design—but also people who started as screen writers, comedians, musicians, and actors…
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How do I convince someone to build what I've designed?
’ll start with the short answer: you can’t.
But let’s talk about it. Imagine you’re a designer on a product, and you have spent a lot of time designing a great feature, which you know is elegant and your users will love. All you have to do it get it built!
But then you go to the rest of the team…