Episode 15 – Design Tools and Tactics
Anyone learning about building and designing voice experiences needs to have a set of tools and tactics for approaching the design and iteration. In this episode with Braden Ream and Michael Hood, we dig into several of the primary tactics and tools available for designers today, including scripting, flowcharts, and more. You’ll learn about the value of these different techniques and why you will most likely want to utilize more than one in your work.
Guests – Braden Ream & Michael Hood
Michael Hood is the cofounder and Head of Product at Voiceflow. Braden Ream is the cofounder and CEO at Voiceflow. Voiceflow is a creative suite of tools to help creative professionals design, prototype, and build voice interfaces and apps. Voiceflow has over 10,000 users, and is backed by True Ventures in San Francisco.
Links
Transcript
Jeremy Wilken
Welcome to design for voice. I’m your host, Jeremy Wilken. And today, we’re going to be looking at different design approaches that you can take and how they might be applied into the process of building out voice experiences. And there might be some different tactics and tools that will discover along the way. Today, I’m joined by Braden ream and Michael hood of voice flow, why don’t we kick it off? Tell us a little bit more about yourselves and Voiceflow.
Braden Ream
Thanks for having us. So I’m Brandon, the CEO Voiceflow.
Michael Hood
Yeah. And I’m Mike, I lead product here. And we are building the Creative Suite for voice interfaces.
Jeremy Wilken
So what we want to kind of start with today’s talking about what are the different types of design techniques that already exists out there, some of them come from traditional design and development, like scripting or flow charts. But what other things are out there today, that are kind of more standard common design tactics that people are using when they’re trying to build out their voice experiences?
Michael Hood
Yeah. So I think generally, you know, scripting and flow charts, those are kind of two extremely popular examples of, you know, where people start, when they’re when they’re looking to build a voice interface. And then on top of that, we have, you know, newer approaches, you know, if we look at the work Amazon is doing with situational designs, and in the storyboard approach, but I think, you know, at voice flow, talking to users talking to the UI professionals, daily, you know, those really scripting flow charts and storyboards, kind of, you know, probably provide, you know, at least 90% of what people are doing today. Now, that might not be the future that might not be, you know, what the, you know, creative community needs to build a really great in police interfaces, but that’s kind of the state of affairs.
Jeremy Wilken
Alright, so let’s talk a little bit. Let’s start with scripting for a moment. Let’s define it real quick, in case someone’s not familiar with it, and then talk a little bit about what it’s really good at.
Michael Hood
Sure. So the easiest way to think about scripting is I opened a Word document, I heard of a few other software’s that people actually use that are more tailored, but will use Word and then I’m essentially saying, you know, user says system says user says system says, and I’m doing this for what I would call my happy paths. So I’m looking at, you can take a kind of a topic approach. So you know, if I am PayPal, I’m building my voice interface, maybe I want to check my balance, I want to send money. You know, I want to, you know, contact customers for who knows, there’s a variety of things, but it’s up to the designer to kind of figure out what what are those key topics, and then scripting is really a great place. Just think about, Hey, you know, this is a potential flow that my conversation could take. And and really, what it’s doing is, it’s putting you in the in the right and mental model to kind of start start building out an interface.
Jeremy Wilken
I think of it kind of like, when you’re writing a script for a play or a movie, right, you actually would dialogue, you know, think of like the amount of space fonts where you’ve got speaker one, or in this case would be, you know, Alexa, or Google or whoever, right agent, and user, and they get like, folded print what they’re going to say. And that just goes back and forth. And you can see literally a way through the system.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah exactly, And it gets you thinking about other things as well, like, you know, we want to use the correct terminology might be like slots or variables, but or entities. But I think as your scripting, you kind of it’s hard to think about these things without actually, you know, getting some something down on I’m on paper. And so I think the you know, and there’s a reason why Amazon and Google, you know, really push, hey, start with the scripts or the script. And I think it’s just because it puts you in the right mental model to build a good book.
Jeremy Wilken
Certainly. And I think, in addition to that you see with the script where the slots and things can actually be applied and put in so you can like circle those things. And you can mark up a script, it’s not just the text, but then you can use that to highlight things throughout the flow and important piece, as well as to read out loud and hear it because if you’re just writing, you’re not going to experience it the same way that a user does. So a lot of times actually playing it out role playing it is really powerful way of wrapping your mind around exactly what’s happening in that moment.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a some people in industry can call that Wizard of Oz testing. So anything that comes up quite frequently on our call. And yeah, and just one last note on that, I think it’s one thing that’s great about scripting is it’s such a low barrier to entry. So you know, it really doesn’t matter who you are the tools, you know, you know, the technical expertise you have, everyone can write a script. So I think, you know, if you’re looking to build a voice interface, you know, a script is never a bad place to start.
Jeremy Wilken
Awesome. And then we talked about flow charts as well. So flow charts being I have, here’s my starting point, and then draw a line to this box where I’m going to do this and so forth. How does it work? Exactly? And I guess there’s lots of ways of building a flowchart. But what’s what’s the basic flow? pun intended, I guess, of going through that process?
Unknown Speaker
Right. So I think it’s important to kind of reading Cade this with flow charts and voicera sign often get a really, really bad rap. And I don’t, I don’t completely disagree, I think if you know, if you’re thinking of kind of just a linear branching dialogue, you’re in the wrong place. But at the same time, a flowchart can be really valuable to just kind of give a high level idea of you know, what, anywhere your conversation is going to go and in the potential different permutations of, you know, what that could look like. So what we see a lot in the in the professional use case is we’ll have a flow chart, you know, have a very clear start. And then essentially, you’ll have solid lines, and in the middle will be some form of, you know, written out logic. And so you know, duplicate this a bunch of times, typically, lines going everywhere, and you have some high level idea of, you know, how this thing is going to look
Unknown Speaker
when it’s when it’s built. Yeah, and
Jeremy Wilken
I think especially in scenarios, like games, for example, or you’re building a game engine or something with voicera, the interface and so having a very strict flow through that game, maybe essential, or your ordering path where you need certain pieces of information to actually accomplish that. It can be good to identify all of those things, as long as you’re aware that the the specific order of things may not always be the way that it’s designed in the flowchart.
Unknown Speaker
Yes, exactly. So we talked about the mental model and scripting, the mental model with the flow chart is what is is shouldn’t really be looked at as negative. Because when we think of it a flowchart, we think about, you know, we’re going down this path, and there’s no return, there’s no exit, it’s just it’s this path. And it’s always going to be this path. And you may have a choice, but you’re willing, you’re a passenger in this journey. And so if you take that model, then yes, you’re thinking about this wrong. But if you just think of a flowchart more as a, you know, a guide, or the happy path in which a user could take, then I don’t really see a problem there. So, so I think this is kind of segues, interestingly, into a conversation I had with podcasting, or Alaska, where he outlined kind of the three types of voice interactions that we see today. And so the first one is like, super transactional. So you know, going back to that page, Alex MPO, what is my bank balance, its input, and then it’s an output. And so then the second one is, you know, assistant for them conversations. So that would be as you just mentioned, you know, your quiz games, your interactive stories, things like that, where the user is taking, you know, the user understands that they are a passenger, and that, you know, things are going to happen, and, and, you know, that’s just how it’s going to go. And then the last one is, you know, those user driven experiences, bat is, you know, trying to mimic or create a natural conversation. And so I think right now, you know, almost everyone is building for one, the number one or number two. And so in with that in mind, you know, flow charts, for those use cases really do make a ton of sense, and in many ways can be the best thing, the best way to actually quickly, you know, get something to market, especially in an exploratory phase of, you know, boys, at least from the consumers that. And so then the last one, that number three, those user driven experiences, that’s where, you know, as a creative community, and as a company and voice, but we really think about, Hey, you know, if that third, if those user driven experiences are, what the future is, and, you know, how do we unlock that for, for designers? How do we build tooling, you know, that allows people to create those nonlinear conversation, you know, in the best way possible? So that’s really the, you know, the question.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, and with the user driven experiences, this is a new space that we want to get to talk about the future in just a moment. So maybe we can circle back to that, and just a few minutes, let’s focus back on situational design for a moment and outline it just a little bit further. So this is another type of design tactic that I think Paul might be the evangelist of this, I think, and it’s generally trying to think in the moment not so much about a flow, but thinking about based on what I just have, and what I know about the past, what situation I’m at now and what I do about it. So can you give a little bit more information about situational design? And for folks who might not have heard this term?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So I’ll hop in here. So situational design is sort of a new skin on on an older topic. So state based design. And so state based design is you can imagine, you have a bunch of different things that you need to fulfill a particular intent. So let’s say for example, you want to order a Starbucks coffee, you may need the size, you might need the location you want to order from and the type of coffee so you need three different things. You know, there might be outside parameters as well, you know, is this your first session with the the voice app, and what time of day is it is the store open those sorts of things as well. And essentially, the combination of all those different states would produce a different response. And so it’s not like a flowchart where you go down and you essentially go, if this is true, then go down this path. And if this is true, go down this path, you’re doing it in what Paul on the Amazon team are calling storyboards, do this whole situational design, where you’re going to design the variety of situations based off different combinations of state, if we don’t have location, but we have this in this, then say this, etc, etc. And that will create a whole array of these different cards. And so this is actually been done for a little while now, especially in the VR space, and what they were using before spreadsheets. And so these, this new storyboard approach is just a more intuitive and more well designed system to replace what was predominantly being done on spreadsheets before. That fascinating,
Jeremy Wilken
but when you say state, state based design, state is a more of a concept for programming, it’s this idea of a machine has a certain state, right, it’s on. That’s the state. And in designers, I don’t know if that’s a vocabulary that they’re as familiar with. So if I could push you a little bit harder on the state base concept, how could you break that down a little bit further, for folks who might not be familiar with this concept?
Unknown Speaker
Sure. Yeah, I think like, let’s look at a really, really simple interaction that, you know, user collaborative voices. So let’s, let’s say, user needs to change the temperature. So instead of, you know, Alexa, change the temperature to 74. So I gave this this utterance, or this intent to to the agent, however, there’s essentially infinite permutations of my state. So you know, I can be a first time user as bright and set, the temperature could already be 75 degrees, you know, I could be engaging as myself, you know, maybe that is no different if you know someone else in the homes engaging with that, you know, with that other. And so it’s, it’s really thinking about, Hey, you know, this is in visual design, we can kind of, we dictate the state as designers, right? I hit the landing page, and I already have a subset of buttons, and I have a call to action. And it’s very good clear, you know, I am setting the state of my user invoices on you have to flip the script and the, you know, the user, their current state should dictate, you know, what happens next. So I think that that shift, in kind of design approach, you know, might be challenging. I know, it definitely was challenging for myself coming from you, a UI UX background, but it really is the key to unlock true, you know, human life conversation, is really understanding the state, taking the time to understand all the potential states that a user could be in, and then designing responses and experiences for, you know, for the most important box.
Unknown Speaker
And just just for a little added clarity here, every time we say state, we mean synonymous with situations, a situation is simply a different combination of state, you could have the size, you cannot have location, you can have this, therefore, that means it’s this situation. That’s what we mean by Google called a context of a situation. Call, it states the skills action capsules issue, it’s certainly a recurring theme in the voice space, that there’s a lot of terms for the same thing.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, and that’s, Thank you, that was a really good breaking down of that, like, you know, state changes over time, right? If I’m in a car, or I’m in my house, and someone asks me where I’m going, I’m going to probably handle that very differently. But it’s the same question. And, and being it to be human about that, and recognizing where I’m at, you know, location information, or what device I’m talking to all that adds to that state, as well as what have I done in the past? And if I’ve recently been talking about the, you know, I’ve been talking about Abraham Lincoln. And then I asked questions about when he was president, you know, that’s also state that would be carried through the conversation to know that I’m talking about this person, instead of you having to say, Who are you talking about. And so it brings continuity to the experience, which is why it’s so important. And it’s flow charts and things can can lose that if you think that state always comes through a certain path, which is, I think, where you said we, we have to be careful about flow charts, and they do get a bad rap. And they can provide a lot of things. But they also make it difficult for people who are looking at them, and trying to figure out the flow of things if they go to that flow, or build the experience based on what they see there. They might miss the the grander picture here of all these permutations of situation or state or context. And we’re left with this flow where you’re forced out, I’ve tried out an app that was like a mortgage calculator, and it’s simply said, you know, what’s, what’s the mortgage amount? And then it would only accept an answer. I couldn’t like, go back and edit a pretty is question or do anything other than that I couldn’t even leave the app they wouldn’t. Like it captured that somehow and forced me to answer a numeric value. And it’s like, this is not, this is a example of how the flowchart got kind of got the experience wrong, a well built flow chart.
Braden Ream
So the great thing about flow charts is, it is the most powerful way to design. And the thing is, we sort of take shortcuts, if you you can do state based design using flow charts, if you have logic. So for example, if this state is this, then go down this path, and you can actually do it. But the problem with flow charts is that there are just so many permutations of situation and state that it actually becomes such an unruly tree that people don’t think it’s possible with flow charts, but it is, however, just completely impractical.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, exactly. There’s a point at which the reasoning breaks down and you look at this, it becomes them. It’s like that in the airline magazine, where they show you all the places you can fly. And there’s so many lines on the map that you can’t tell where any of the lines actually go. But you can see the end points that they’re going to, it’s like, you lose the, you lose the path between the two. So same same thing here. Yeah, I think flow charts, I use them, I, I generally say you need probably two things, you need to at least do two types of design, and codifying your design to make it sensible to everybody. Because some things will make sense to some people and not to others. And also, it just gives you a wider view of that thing that you’re building. If you script it and storyboard it, or, you know, you actually use flow charts and scripting as well, whatever the case is, two things will broaden and multiply that that vision much more clearly than just relying only on one.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, and you know, that’s what we see people doing. So, you know, when when we’re talking to users, when we’re talking to, you know, the UI designers, you know, building some pretty common experiences, and really being the first people at these, you know, companies or agencies thinking about this, they’re doing both, you know, they have their, their flow chart, you know, using a number of tools, and they have their spreadsheet, which is, you know, kind of acting as that, that station. And so what they use the flowchart for is, you know, communicating with external stakeholders on, you know, this is how this is going to learn, you know, communicating with your internal team, I’m just, you know, give a really easy visual representation of what’s happening. And then at the same time, they need to communicate with their development team. And so, you know, that’s where the Excel sheet comes in. So, you know, yeah, we, you know, we see people applying both these these strategies at the same time.
Jeremy Wilken
So there’s a few, obviously, like voice flow, and there’s other software being built today that that’s relatively new. And these are platforms that are building out conversational design experiences that are more along the situation, design path, but what are these different software plugins sounds like and how does this lead us towards the future of designing for voice?
Braden Ream
Yeah, you know, the way we typically look at other platforms, and, you know, sort of the competitive landscape in general is, the more the merrier, because I don’t think anyone’s figured it out. So, you know, there are probably less than 10,000 professional UI designers out there right now. And so as as you know, space as an industry, it’s really important that we have as many people trying to train others trying to embed best practices and trying to figure out, you know, what is it that, you know, what does a good conversational design software look like? And how can we, you know, promote the existence of more of them. I don’t think there’s necessarily any one platform, which is amazing, amazing at everything, I generally think, you know, for example, the GUI platforms that have added voice functionality might be really good at state based design, there’s a lot of flow charting software out there. Like, for example, Vizio, and whimsical, and they’re obviously good at flow charts, but then they don’t allow you to prototype or tests or do state based design very well. So I think it really depends on what you’re trying to do, I think there’s a tool for everything at this point. And I, you know, we try to encourage people at voice flow to try out as many of them as you can, they’re all generally, you know, relatively easy to learn how to use and find out, you know, what’s best for your team, what’s best for your workflow, and you know, what you’re trying to do? You know, we serve almost, I think, you know, over 10,000, designers, developers now, and a lot of them, you know, don’t just use voice flow, they’ll have three or four different tools that, you know, they’ll pull out of their toolbox on any given day, depending on the task. And so, you know, that’s generally the approach we we push right now,
Jeremy Wilken
do you see people like, what are the what are the skills people are going to need? As the software? does things like automatically design and prototype in one like, package? What are the skills that we need, either as developers or designers to cultivate so that as we build more and more complex and move towards that third category of user driven experiences? What are the skills we need?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, well, I think, you know, just like any UI, UX designer, you know, has a tool of choice, you know, whether they use, you know, sigma, or sketch or Photoshop, you know, or XD or Marvel, you know, the, the list goes on early. So, you know, I think understanding learning a tool is important. At least one is Britain decision, and there’s a myriad of tools out there, I think, you know, playing around with a lot of demonstrate, on top of that, you know, learn learn how the tech works, we talked to a lot of people that, you know, are new to the space, and, you know, haven’t really taken the time to understand the intricacies of, you know, voice, I guess the, you know, the underlying tactic, you know, that it’s like 10 slots, and to us, you know, understand these things, understand how they actually play into the user experience, so that when you’re designing these interfaces, you know, you’re not just kind of handing off, you know, what would be synonymous to just a static sketch file, have, you know, it can be a little more, you can be a little more knowledgeable there, and, you know, help help the your development team out.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, certainly, the challenge in some of the visual design spaces been using one medium for design, and then exporting that to a developer who then has to guess some of the things that are
Unknown Speaker
depicted, I think that’s one thing that’s really interesting about voice is that, you know, we’ll see people, you know, come onto our platform with an idea, and, and very little to no tech, technical expertise, and whether they are in the mindset that they’re designing or prototyping are building, you know, they’re creating something fully functional. So I think, you know, in the, in the visual space, someone that did that really well with web. So, you know, they kind of packaged the power of front end web web development, at least from a landing page perspective into, you know, a tool that gave designers the ability to actually not just design, but to prototype and to build, you know, as they’re designing, and I think that voice in many respects, offers that, you know, at least some degree of of that, that same thing, when you are writing the scripts, when you are writing out the intense the slots, you know, when you’re writing out your prompts and responses, to some level, you are developing, you know, this, this, this voice interface, I’m sure you might need a developer to come in and, you know, add the fulfillment and codify the situation. But I don’t think their voice needs to be one of those spaces where there’s a massive gap between design and development, I actually think the opposite and that it can, it can be quite, quite tightly net,
Jeremy Wilken
agree with a lot of the where it has to be tighter together. Because we control a little bit less of the surface area, like we may have our guard rails and what we can do in voice, but versus a website or something, you can visually force people to click on certain buttons or to see certain pages, but we’re at the will of the user in many cases. And so we have to be much more tightly integrated with how design and development work together, because I have to understand users at a deeper level than I would argue, traditional web design does, in most cases, and and that’s a factor of the medium, as well as how things have evolved over the last 20, three years, or however long the internet’s been around now.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, in just from a really practical standpoint, if we look at, let’s just use, you know, the Alexa skills as a proxy, if we go on the Alexa store and look at, you know, the 80,000, I think it’s getting close to 100,000. Now, skills that have, you know, been built, you know, these aren’t things, a lot of them are very useful, and a lot of people actually don’t like them. And the reason being, to some extent, now, I’m not hitting this fully on developers, but you know, these are built by developers, you know, design for voice is, you know, kind of a new idea. It’s something that, you know, people haven’t fully grasped yet. And that’s, that’s what makes it really exciting. And that’s why, you know, we see a bunch of software companies trying to provide solutions, or, you know, you know, at the very least talking to people in the space, understanding their workflow, because this is these are problems that are I know, aren’t salt. And I would I report anyone that that says that they’ve, they’ve solved, including ourselves. So and,
Braden Ream
you know, what, what’s interesting with the voice space, is, as Mike was alluding to, it’s, you, you don’t know what a good voice design is, until you actually have a human talk to it. When you’re designing a GUI, you know, a graphic interface, designers who have a good eye for design can typically tell what a good design looks like, yeah, you know, the button should be here, that looks great. And you can typically ship something without having to go through an insane amount of iterations on the actual visual design. But in voice, you know, you can only imagine how you know, you would speak when you’re scripting, you’re coming from your own biases of how you talk and how you communicate with other people. And so, you know, user testing, and prototyping becomes such a huge component, I would argue more so than the graphic interfaces, because you actually have to anticipate how other people talk. And you just cannot do that without actually, you know, putting it in front of them. So, you know, we see user testing and prototyping as an in large part of the design process. Now, to the point where we have companies come on, where they already have a script, and all they want to do is, you know, slap together really quick prototype on voice flow before they get the building. Because, you know, that’s what you need to do to actually design something, that’s fantastic. You need to prototype it first.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, and just just add on there, like, now we are in this, you know, this phrase is used a lot, but you know, we’re in the, for the first matter of, you know, the first ending of, you know, voice of voice design. So I think that the luxury that, you know, UI and UX design have is that people have solved a lot of the really hard design problems. And that wasn’t one company that did it, you know, one company didn’t say, Hey, you know, we’re going to put a static nav bar, on the bottom, you know, was the creative community that you know, tried different things, found out what works found out what didn’t. And then in doing that, you know, now every app you open up, typically, you know, is laid out somewhat similarly. And so you know, we haven’t found those those design trends invoice yet. And you know, it might be a little a little harder, given that people can’t see it. But I think that that’s going to be something that’s really important years, gardenless of the tooling, you have.
Braden Ream
Just to add on to Mike’s point there. There’s a lot of great case studies and sort of articles on when the web first came out, the first websites look like brochures, because that was the medium before. And so that’s what we understood. And then when the first mobile apps came out, a lot of them were designed like websites, because that’s the medium before it. And that’s what we knew. And so now you’re having a lot of these voice apps, which are being treated almost like mobile, and that it’s walking you through the menu of Hi, there, here’s the three things we can do you know, kin to the three buttons on your mobile app, and then you know, the user selects it, you know, that’s like tapping it. Okay, now, here’s, you know, the next set of options, very similar to like a mobile a mobile interface. If you were to turn, you know, this, this GUI into a movie. And so I, you know, I just think we haven’t found what a good voice user interface looks like. And I think we’re, you know, a heck of a lot closer than we were five or 10 years ago, but we’re certainly not there yet. And, you know, I was chatting with a UX person at General Assembly today. And they said, you know, the tools shape the way you think. And it’s totally true. I think as the tooling evolves, it’ll help evolve how we think and know, hopefully, we’ll get to the point where people are going voice first,
Jeremy Wilken
this has been really, really good. I appreciate you guys joining me today. And we need to round it off here with the end of the show, which I like to call the endpoint detection. But to begin that section, let’s circle back and recap, what’s the top takeaway that you have for today?
Unknown Speaker
So I think, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of what we talked about is understanding the different types of tactics we can use when you know, looking to design a voice interface. But you know, what assembly of those tactics is the right one is something that is, you know, is not solidified. And so I think, you know, to wrap that up in just one sentence is, is, you know, in order to find that solution, I think that, you know, we need just need to get more people building, building voice interfaces, and see what happens.
Jeremy Wilken
All right, what’s one interesting voice experience that you’ve had recently?
Unknown Speaker
Okay, interesting. So I just got my air pods the other day. So I was excited to see kind of what those could do. So I actually, just this morning, I ordered an Uber to the office. And when I was what was I doing, I was getting ready or something out of many airports, and I was listening to music I’m booked, you know, serious that you know, how far away is my Uber. And it did not think that was, you know, interestingly bad, not positive. But I think that’s a you know, an example of you know, where there needs to be some designer, they’re thinking about the situations that are users and and building for those. And then I think another one is really interesting, although I haven’t used it is McDonald’s. So I use this app every day in Toronto called ritual where you order you order food before time you pay a you know, a tiny premium, and then you just go pick it up rather than waiting, and those long punch lines. And so I thought for a long time, like, Hey, you know, all these all these voice activated cars are going to, you know, have Alexa Google says, you know, is the is the drive thru going to get automated away, into more I ordered and pick it up. And so lo and behold, McDonald’s, you know, a lot announced last week that they’re there. They’re, I guess, piloting that experience in some locations in Chicago.
Braden Ream
A couple weeks ago, I was walking down to the diner, which is a big street in Toronto. And I was just with a friend. And I saw this young group of girls beside us, and one of the girls pulled out her phone and actually invoked Alexa to ask for help. Which is funny, because that’s one of the things that, you know, we talked about, you know, voice is going to be everywhere, people going to be using voice for everything. But it’s not something that you generally see every day, and it’s more so, you know, a conceptual statement. So to actually see someone go voice first, and then you know, the in the middle of the street, you know, there’s no reason for them to use a leftover any other medium, but they still chose to, you know, bring up the phone and use Alexa. That was really cool. And, you know, that was a big moment. And I think the next one for us is going to be when I see someone purchase something, you know, they do some voice commerce from the subway, I think that, you know, that’ll be the next one for me that, you know, we’re moving a lot faster than we think.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, the future is is wide open on a lot of this stuff. And I think you’re right, the the adoption, is it starting to show and people are trying to figure out their choices and preferences, and sometimes they’ll use it. And I’m curious to see where all this is going to go? What kinds of resources do you recommend for people who want to learn about design?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think it does depend on on what you’re building in the context of Alexa skills and Google actions. I think the platforms themselves have a lot of really good resources that can get you in the right state of mind and, you know, get you up to speed quickly. So I think it’s either an Alexa design or design, Alexa, and Google kind of has a counterpart to that. Where you, you know, the messaging is a little different. A lot of there’s a lot of overlap. But yeah, I think those are definitely good places to start.
Jeremy Wilken
Excellent. And finally, how can people learn more about you and your work and your company?
Braden Ream
Yeah, they can go to voice Khaled calm, and you can sign up for free and you know, get started, hopefully input implementing some of the practices we were chatting about today. Other than that, I think we’re on Twitter as well. Voice flow HQ. I’m personally there’s room Braden, I think, Mike, Mike, what’s your handle?
Unknown Speaker
I don’t even know might be underscore. I signed up a few days ago, her brain into request everyone to get a microphone, please. I think I have six followers. That’s fun. Yes, double that. Same for 12.
Jeremy Wilken
All right. Well, okay, this was a great episode, I really appreciate all of your thoughts and sharing these different design tactics and processes. I think experienced designers will be familiar with these things. But I still think there’s good stuff in for them as they’re trying to compare and understand where things are going and what kinds of things they might need to be leveling up on in their skills. I think especially especially in the space of testing, and prototyping and understanding the the core technologies under the hood, because those are going to dictate what the designs can actually promise and fulfill. Also,
Braden Ream
one of the most interesting things I’ve noticed is from talking to a ton of professional UI designers is there sort of like a parabola effect on flow charts, and that people start looking like a like an upside down parabola. So people start loving flow charts. So when you first get into UI design, it’s your favorite thing in the middle. So you have intermediate sort of novices, as they start to hear about situational design, they start to say, flow charts are the worst. And then, you know, we’ve talked to some of the world’s best food designers now. And people who teach this, you know, they teach human computer interaction courses at pristine universities, and they go now flow charts are great. So you sort of go through this middle period of of disliking them, I think, because you’re supposed to dislike them. But at the end of the day, you know, there’s nothing better at the moment, as long as the software enables the flow chart to hop around and have contacts and things like that. Just little fun little tidbit at the end.
Jeremy Wilken
Yeah, great. And it’s so true, all of these things are going to be useful. And some of them might be more useful in certain cases than others. But your awareness of these different things, scripting situations, design, storyboarding flow charts, will will make you a better designer or developer even. And using those things, especially if you pair them up will hopefully unlock additional opportunities that you could build with with your voice skills. So once again, thank you for joining me today. And it’s been a great time. We’ll make sure all the links and things are on the website. So just want to thank you one more time. Both Burton and Mike.
Braden Ream
Yeah, thanks so much for having us. It was fun.
Jeremy Wilken
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. And if you liked the show, please rate us on your favorite podcast player. All of the show notes are available on design for voice.com