Episode 12 – Building Personas

Wally Brill of Google describes how personas are an invaluable aspect to voice and conversational design because they provide a foundation to the rest of the design process and help unify a team around a consistent experience.

Guest – Wally Brill

Wally Brill is the Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education at Google.

For 20 years he’s taught robots all over the World to carry on natural conversations for the Fortune 500 and their customers. Now at Google, he helps internal groups and external partners develop and maintains best practices of conversation design for the Google Assistant.

Transcript

Jeremy Wilken
Welcome to design for voice podcast. Here’s a highlight from today’s episode,

Wally Brill
make sure you design a persona. Just absolutely do it. Insist on it. Don’t question whether you should or shouldn’t. There’s no such thing. There’s no persona.

Jeremy Wilken
Welcome to design for voice. I’m your host, Jeremy Wilken. And today we’re going to be talking about personas and how you might want to integrate them into your design workflows for voice design. I’m joined today by Wally Brill, head of conversational design, advocacy and education at Google. Welcome to the show, Wally.

Wally Brill
Hi, thanks for having me, Jeremy,

Jeremy Wilken
once you give us a little bit of your background, in the voice space, and you’re quite a veteran in the industry, so I think it’ll be interesting to hear the kinds of things you’ve been up to in the past.

Wally Brill
up to in the past, when I was a dishwasher, I was a taxi driver in New York, I then ended up as a DJ on a pirate radio station in the middle of North Atlantic, which led me to enter the music industry, which I was in for very many years, as a recording engineer and producer, mostly in in, in the UK. And I wanted to create an opera, which would be interactive, that would have various, sort of Choose Your Own Adventure aspects to it. And I was looking for a technology to do that with and I heard about speech recognition. So I called the people at nuance up and I said, What’s this all about? And they said, you know about sound we know about speech rec, wanting to come and work here for a while and learn what it’s about. So I ended up doing that. And unfortunately, I never went back to the music business, which still I kicked myself every morning. But why didn’t I go back to the music? anyway. So here I am, all these years later, actually, 20 years later,

working at Google and doing this wonderful, fun stuff.

Jeremy Wilken
Excellent. So I wanted to talk to you about your experience in it stems from working I know you’ve done through nuance to today about how to actually think about the design, but in the perspective of building out a persona. So I wanted to start and just make sure everyone understands what a persona is, and and why they matter.

Wally Brill
Okay, so a persona is basically in human terms, the face you show to the world, it’s it’s the impression people take away is who you are, as far as they’re concerned. And it’s, it’s everywhere. I mean, everybody has a persona, there’s no way to get around it, you just have fun. And some people manipulate them a little bit like actors. And I guess why it’s important is that, as Clifford NASS and Scott brave discovered in their research at Stanford, within about a second of hearing any voice, you automatically and unconsciously create sense of a personality, who that person is that you’re listening to. And it can be a human, it can be the Google system, it can be any anything at all that has a voice, you will imply certain things, obviously, gender, age, level of education, there’s a thing called register, which is the social status of that entity in relation to me. But we also infer intelligence, trustworthiness and likeability. So it’s really important that we get it right when we’re working to create an action for a brand.

Jeremy Wilken
What’s really interesting is how it’s there, even if you’re not thinking about it. So if you’re not applying persona to your development and design process, then it’s being assigned automatically by the users of of your system, right.

Wally Brill
That’s what James Django says he is famously quoted as having said, if you don’t design it, the user will.

Jeremy Wilken
And I think this is one of the things when I started doing more of this, that didn’t seem as important at the time. And I have seen much, much more value in building a persona and bringing that to life throughout the development process. So in order to do that, I want to talk a bit about how you do that, and what the steps are to create that persona. So could what are the what are the top level steps that we would need to think about when we build out a persona for our, our voice experience?

Wally Brill
Well, so if you’re working for a brand, if you’re working for a company of any kind that has a public image, a sense of itself, you need to understand that brand and a deep level, you need to understand the dimensions of the brand and the how those dimensions are expressed. So you would talk to people in brand and marketing, you look at the the brand book you you’ve studied advertising, they’ve done all that kind of stuff, because everything is a touch point. And even the voice interaction that you’re creating is a touch point for the brand. So you want to know how that brand is perceived. And you want to make sure that that whatever you’re doing is congruent to that. Second step is going to be that you want to understand who’s going to be using this voice action. Who’s the audience? Who’s the user? Because it makes a difference? Are they are they frequent users, that’s going to determine the verbosity of the prompts that you create.

And

let me see what else can I tell you about users? So I yeah, I mean, obviously want demographics, are they older, they younger, they millennials, because this is going to affect the language that you use. And I you know, the reason that we do all this, I should take a step back and tell you that the why of this, aside from the fact that people will create that persona in their own minds when they hear the voice. The other piece of this is that we need to be consistent when we’re writing for any of the the the actions that were created. So if there are multiple writers writing for the same brand, they all need to be on exactly the same page, pardon the pun, to make sure that they’re consistent in the language because a prompt may be written by one person, and then another prophet follows it may be written by somebody else. And if they don’t sound like the same character, it’s going to appear a little bit schizo frantic. So we create materials to help keep those writers on track. And also, if we’re using live voice talent, we want to make sure that that live voice actor understands that character, the suit and clothes that they’re putting on to perform this character, because that’s what the that’s what it is performance. Monday, they may be doing ads for cars, Tuesday, they may be selling sausages, but Wednesday, they’re coming into the studio to record your action. And they need to know who the character is that they’re going to be, because it’s not the same person that sold the sausages yesterday. So that’s why these things are important. And we’ll get to that, you know, obviously, we’ll talk about the the documents we create a little later. So you want to understand that user at a deep level, you want to understand the task, it’s got to be a voice friendly task. There’s a friend of mine in Australia, who does this kind of work. And he describes what he calls the raw chicken moment. And he has a slide which has an image of somebody hands holding a pile of rock chicken. And he says at the raw chicken moment, these are the moments where you’re not going to reach into your pocket and pull out your phone, you’re not going to touch it touch brain, you’re going to use your voice. So voice friendly tasks are what we want to create, we want to create something that people can do with their voice, and have a familiarity with so they’ll understand how to do it with their voice. And then then the end, the next step is that we’re going to create people that don’t exist, we’re going to create characters, we’re going to we’re going to understand who these characters are, that would match the brand match the user and be useful for the task. And we’re going to invent them. And we’ll I mean, I guess we’ll talk more about that process as we go forward. But those are the fundamental steps.

Jeremy Wilken
All right, so we’re gonna, we need to understand the brand. And even if you’re not a business, I think it’s important to say there’s a brand involved, even in a hobby creation that you might make, there’s, there’s still something to it, there’s a an element of life that you have to settle on, even if it’s something lower level than a corporate brand, you understand the user, understand the task, and then build or create appropriate characters to match the the overall brand and experience.

Wally Brill
Absolutely right. Awesome.

And the way we do that, in terms of those characters, is we take all of these inputs. And when we’re when we’re, when we’re talking about the inputs, where we’re really sifting everything down, we’re making an idealized employee, if we’re working for a company, who’s the very best person to represent the company performing this task. And that’s what we want to design. on, you know, on the on the left end, you could conceivably be designing aliens and, and all kinds of robots and all kinds of things. And that’s fine to over on the other side of things, you might want somebody that’s fairly traditional in that role. So there’s a wide spectrum, and you can do pretty much anything that’s appropriate. I do stress approach.

So so to go a little deeper into how we do it.

First, we want to take those inputs and make some assumptions about metaphor. In other words, where is this being? What do they have around them? What are they what’s, what’s there? What’s their job. And so what we do is we we, we sit this down, and we say, Okay, let’s create a bio of this person, or this entity. And we go into quite a lot of detail about who they are, where they’re from, because again, accent is something that you can detect. They are, what what size? Are they how much they weigh? How tall are they because that affects the sound of the voices in a big voices in a little voice. All of these things are important, what kind of work do they do, we even want to understand about their families, we want to understand what influenced them to do the job they do. So in in certain cases, there’s one persona we talk about, who works for an airline, and we learn who their parents are, because one of them might have been in hospitality and one of them might have been in banking or something. So they learn hospitality how to take care of people. And they also have detail orientation. So those are the kinds of factors we want to pull out, we want to tease those out. And we want to tie them back to the brand, as we understand it, and certainly in terms of the brand and mentioned. So we want to link everything in the bio, to the brand dimensions to make sure that it’s appropriate. That’s a

Jeremy Wilken
quite a bit of detail really for creating a backstory. You know, you’re actually describing them physically and their their work history, it’s almost like a quite literally a real person. Except they don’t exist. Is it always necessary to go in such depth? Or is that something that kind of depends on the complexity of the experience or the brand?

Wally Brill
No, I you know, as a rule, it’s good to do this. It’s not an onerous task. And generally, if we’re, if we’re doing it for a brand will create, you know, two or three of these, and then user test them to understand what is the best brand fit, but it’s not that onerous is task to do it. And then there’s more than 10 it’s not it. What we do next is we create a monologue. And that monologue is a paragraph or two of a story that this character may be telling to a friend, in a bar, wherever, you know, a social environment, but just talking about something, it may be they talking about their job, and maybe they’re talking about a car they want to buy, it doesn’t matter. The point is we want to have the sound of this person’s conversation, we want to understand what they sound like when they’re talking. Because if we just do it from prompts, we don’t really get a sense of the character. We if we go the other way, and have more in depth content that we record, then the prompts will show themselves as being correct or not. And we record this monologue, if we’re using live voice talent, obviously, with that live live voice artist, if we’re using text to speech, which is computer generated speech, will record it with inappropriate text to speech voice to see what it sounds like. And this gives us much more of an in depth guide to what this character is going to be like in an interaction. And then the next step on jumping ahead here, but the next step is just as you would in any design for speech, you’re going to create sample dialogues. Sample dialogues are like a two part play. There’s a user on one side, there’s the persona of the system on the other side, and they have a conversation about the tasks. So welcome to Acme bank. Did you want to transfer funds today? Yes. How much did you want to transfer blah, blah, blah, from what account but but we write out that interaction, so that we can see what the sound of this persona is going to be like actually doing the job?

Jeremy Wilken
Interesting. So it seems like we’re obviously the sample dialogue should be part of any design process. But we’re, we’re trying to enhance that and bring in what are these, this this background, this recording of an actual monologue from this person to help humanize and even bring this, this character to the fullness of life that we can in our mind’s eye, so that when we’re writing dialogue, that’s always there helping to guide Is that a fair way of putting it? I mean, I,

Wally Brill
you know, the thing is that, you can have the same task performed by two different personas, and it will come off completely differently because of the way they are as characters, and also because of the language they use. So one example I use a lot is of airlines. So you can have a flag carrier and national flag carrier from, say, Great Britain. And their persona may be very formal, and say things like you require information regarding your flight to London today, which is perfectly natural in formal English speech. But you might also have another airline, that’s much hipper, much younger, much more millennial. And that that persona might say, Do you want info about your flight, same exact content, very differently delivered because the words are different. And because the way the character delivers it is different.

So it makes it’s an important differentiator for a brand.

Jeremy Wilken
That makes sense. And I I can see that example. I can obviously picture in my mind, right, there’s different airlines, and some of them have the trendy millennial style to them. And use in their visual design might also pair with that, right, the bread cup, and large fonts, whatever. And then the traditional carriers maybe have the more formal looking styles anyways, I think that ties in though you can use the visual aspects of a brand as part of that persona, because it might guide you in ways that you hadn’t thought about. And it’s probably part of your first step understanding the brand. What about in cases where this is not a brand, but let’s say it’s a game or it’s a, some, some kind of just one off experience that stands alone, like a note taking app? That’s not really a big brand? What kinds of things might you want to understand or add to this persona to help you build those out?

Wally Brill
Well, I mean, whatever it is, just as you said earlier, you know, if you don’t design it, the user jobs, whatever the application is, it requires these steps because it has to be consistent. And it has to make sense. So even just a utilitarian app. In home automation, for example, that has a personality to it, everything has a personality. So it really doesn’t matter what the what that task is. And it doesn’t matter if there’s a brand or not. With games, it’s really, really important to make sure those characters live, because otherwise the game just falls flat. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it applies everywhere. Let’s talk

Jeremy Wilken
a little bit more about personas and how they fit into the overall design process. So you’ve got a persona, let’s say, how does it fit? When do you do it as part of your design process?

Wally Brill
Basically, we do it at an early stage, because it influences lots and lots of things. We will obviously want to take requirements of what this task is, what are we trying to do. But the next step is really got to be who’s doing it, you know, who’s who is that persona. And so it comes early in the process. And once we have that persona, then we can start writing sample dialogues. And we we designed from sample dialogues, we don’t design from flow charts, basically, we start with what’s the conversation, because if the conversations natural people are going to succeed, if it’s unnatural, if it’s an engineering exercise, based on a flowchart, they’ll probably have less success. So we need to keep, we need to use the conventions of conversation, to keep people on track and make them comfortable.

Jeremy Wilken
Alright, so you, you’ll take that persona, and you keep it tightly coupled with a couple, but you have it ready to reference at any point as you’re doing your dialogues. And as you’re doing your scripts and things, do you have other places that you pull it out and use it?

Wally Brill
Um, you you know, the thing is, as you go forward working with this persona, you’re going to understand it at a deep level. And just as a script writer is writing dialogue, you’re going to be writing dialogue. And it will make sense to you, if it rings true to the persona to what what’s in the monologue or in the recorded sample dialogues. It’ll either work or at home. And it’s really important two things are really important here. One is you have to hear dialogue, you can’t actually read it, it doesn’t make any sense when you read it. So you absolutely have to hear it. So record it with something and listen back to it. Even at the most basic level, get somebody to read it with you. So that you can tell us the conversations working, but you really have to read it. And if you have stakeholders that you’re trying to give information to as you’re in the process, always record whatever you click on is and played on the recording, don’t show them squares,

Jeremy Wilken
I can see that a lot with stakeholders being disconnected from the design and process that’s going on having that is a quick and easy way to see it without maybe having built it yet. But if you just show them text, they’re not going to have the same mental picture or the actual experience because we do process differently. Just the way our brains work process sound versus text differently.

Wally Brill
Absolutely. And once you have those sample dialogues recorded, that’s half the battle. That’s that’s pretty much what the things going to sound like. And that can that can take you a long way with the stakeholders.

Jeremy Wilken
Do you find that you are should people be revising personas over time? Is this something you want to set and try to follow religiously? Or do you mind having it evolve over time? And maybe during the design process, you start to change that persona, maybe they become a younger or an older character? What does that look? consistency? Like?

Wally Brill
Yeah, I think that’s unlikely, the younger older, I mean, you might find that with an assistive action, the persona might get less formal as you go forward. And then as it gets to know you. So for example, with the Google Assistant Google system knows me by name, it recognizes my voice, it knows my calendar, it knows how long it’s going to take me to get to work. So it it’s fairly informal with me around those things. Now, we didn’t actually make it so that it it became less formal, that’s just a an attribute of the kind of content that we that we have in the assistant. And that comes through as as you work with it. But yeah, I mean, it’s conceivable that the persona might become less formal as it gets to know you better.

Jeremy Wilken
So it makes sense, what you’re kind of saying is that the persona will probably in place, but the way that the person relates to it might smooth out a little bit might be a little bit less formal, might be a little bit shorter, and the responses to ease the transactions that are happening between between the user and the system, you make a great point.

Wally Brill
The shortening the dialogue, is what we call tape, right? And it’s really important. So the first time that you speak to an action, the persona might give you some exposition of how to use the action, it might give you some helpful tips, whatever. But as you use this action, repeatedly, the responses are going to become less verbose. It’s going to be much prefer, you know, it’s, it’s when you say to somebody,

if you say somebody write down my shopping list,

and the other person goes, Okay, what do you want on your shopping list? And you go,

Unknown Speaker
I want

Wally Brill
a canned tuna. They might say, okay, a can of tuna. But the next time you say a can of tuna, and they’re just going to go Got it? Yeah. Right.

They just got to accept and, and, and approve those choices. Rather than expanding at all.

Jeremy Wilken
Right, we want to just simplify it for the user. So I guess that persona will help you identify maybe those kinds of things do they say? Got it? You know, what kind of, they’re almost like interjections, what kinds of things are appropriate? And I guess the formality in formality, those things will help guide you quite a bit in what those little short stances might sound like?

Wally Brill
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Wilken
All right. I’ve got two last questions if we’ve got just a few more minutes. So one is, you mentioned really briefly about validating a persona. So can you dive into that just a little bit more? How do you validate that you’ve got the right persona.

Wally Brill
So one way that we do it is we use a tool called dialogue flow, which is available online. And you can build experiences in dialogue flow. And for a quick and dirty usability test, we might just throw some sample dialogues into dialogue flow, and then have users actually work through the action. Because it’s a prototype, so they can work through the action, and we’ll learn a lot about brand fit will learn a lot about a lot about how usable the action is. All kinds of really useful stuff. But that’s, that’s that’s a quick and dirty way to do it.

Jeremy Wilken
Good. Yeah, that makes sense. or other types of testing. You mentioned usability testing, or there’s Wizard of Oz style, which is basically what you described the dialogue flow, but with just a person sitting behind the curtain, if you will.

Wally Brill
So yeah, the problem with that with persona is you don’t really get a read on persona. Because the sound of the voice. Whenever you’re doing persona, at least record the prompts with the actual voice and play them back

through HTML or whatever, whatever process you want to use.

Jeremy Wilken
That makes a lot of sense. My last question is just any other tips, tricks or possible anti patterns that you have for building out your persona?

Wally Brill
Be creative, be expensive, take risks. Understand, something I learned in the music industry is that when you’re recording on vocal, if a recording artist goes and gives you 125%, of everything they’ve got, and they really, really push the boundaries of a project performance, it will come back as 100%. Basically, you lose some in the perception of it. So the persona can be fairly extreme. And it’s not going to come across as as extreme as you think it is. So don’t be afraid to take risks.

Jeremy Wilken
This is the final part of the show. I call it end point detection to kind of wrap things up. So before a couple of questions, I like to ask all of my guests, what is the top takeaway that you would suggest to people from today?

Wally Brill
Make sure you design a persona? Absolutely. Do it. Insist on it? Don’t question whether you should or shouldn’t. There’s no such thing as no persona.

Follow the process. And it will serve you well.

Jeremy Wilken
All right. Do you have suggestions for resources for people who want to learn more about personas and how to build them?

Wally Brill
Sure. First off, there’s a website that we have at Google. And the address is actions.google.com slash design. Once again, that’s actions.google.com slash design, which is a fantastic resource. So the other great resources, our own Kathy pearls book, Kathy is the head of conversation design outreach here at Google. And she’s written a fabulous book called designing voice user interfaces, which I highly recommend. I would also suggest that people look for anything by Clifford NASS, the man who lied to his laptop, the media equation, anything by cliff, NASS, is well worth reading.

Jeremy Wilken
Excellent. I’ll make sure to link all those in the show notes for folks so they can quickly find those resources. And I’ll find the links to Clifford’s books. Another question is, what is an interesting experience that you’ve had recently and a voice app? interesting experience.

Wally Brill
So I really like the timeout, London. I don’t know if it’s accessible from the United States. But it’s really interesting. It’s got a great persona. It’s a sort of 20 something millennial, who’s a little bit sassy. And she’s kind of funny. And it comes across really well. Timeout magazine, is a magazine that lists events happening in London that day, and restaurant suggestions and all that kind of stuff. But it’s a really, it’s a really good persona, and it works quite well. Obviously, in the Google Assistant, if you ask for lucky trivia, you’re going to get this amazing transition from the Google Assistant as she normally is into her putting on the mantle of a game show host and she even tells you that she’s doing. And she becomes this excited game game show host, which is really quite fun. So I like both of us.

Jeremy Wilken
Awesome. And last question, how can people learn more about you and your work?

Wally Brill
Well, you can always Google me. That word again, which will mostly turn up stuff from the music industry. But a few talks here in there around this topic and a few others around speech recognition, and voice applications. And you can always reach out to me on twitter at at Wally Brill. And yeah, look forward to hearing from people.

Jeremy Wilken
Excellent. Well, thank you for joining me today. This was a really good overview of personas. And I think that’ll be very helpful for people who are either getting started or some folks might learn a few things who are already in the in the business. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Wally Brill
Total pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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 the show notes are available on design for voice.com

« Previous Episode 11 – What’s New in Design From Alexa Conf
Next Episode 13 – Conversational Maxims »