Unpacking Practitioners’ Attitudes Towards Codifications of Design Knowledge for Voice User Interfaces

Title of the Paper

Unpacking Practitioners’ Attitudes Towards Codifications of Design Knowledge for Voice User Interfaces

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface Design
• Keywords: Design Guidelines, Voice User Interfaces, Industry Practitioners, Conversational User Interfaces, Design Knowledge, Terminology Issues, User Experience, Harmonisation, Design Processes, Industry Standards

Research Background and Problems

• Problems and Challenges:

  • Current design guidelines, principles, and best practices for Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) lack feedback from industry practitioners.
  • There is very limited research on how design knowledge is understood and practically applied by practitioners.
  • It remains unclear whether platform-specific guidelines meet practitioners’ needs and whether there is a demand for harmonisation of guideline content across the industry.

• Significance:

  • As voice user interfaces (e.g., Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant) gain popularity, VUI design is evolving and maturing.
  • Understanding how industry practitioners adopt design principles and guidelines is a critical prerequisite for improving user experience quality.

• Motivation and Related Work:

  • Both academia and industry have attempted to preserve and share design knowledge through “design guidelines” and “principles.”
  • While there is existing experience with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and interactive voice response systems (IVRs), how to transition smoothly to VUIs remains unresolved.
  • This study aims to understand industry practitioners’ perspectives on design knowledge through interviews and surveys, providing directions for future research.

Solution

• Research Methods:

  • Preliminary Survey: A questionnaire was used to screen practitioners with actual experience in VUI design.
  • Interview Study: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 9 practitioners to explore their design processes, views on guidelines, and the practical application of guidelines in their work.
  • Analysis Methods: Thematic analysis combining inductive and deductive approaches was used to code and organize the interview data.

• Research Focus:

  • Investigating terminology issues in VUI design: whether practitioners clearly distinguish between terms like design guidelines, principles, and best practices.
  • Understanding how design guidelines are integrated into practitioners’ design processes.
  • Evaluating the practical significance of harmonising design guidelines across different platforms.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:

  1. Terminology Confusion:

     • Practitioners do not have a consistent understanding of terms like design guidelines, principles, and best practices. Some practitioners distinguish subtle differences between these terms (e.g., “design guidelines” as specific “how-to” methods and “principles” as higher-level design values), while others use these terms interchangeably.

  2. Design Processes and Application of Guidelines:

     • Practitioners generally follow user-centered design processes, including needs definition, scriptwriting, prototyping, and evaluation testing.
     • The use of design guidelines shows a stratified pattern: novice practitioners tend to treat platform-provided guidelines as authoritative resources, while experienced practitioners use guidelines as a starting point, customizing or creating their own based on experience.
     • Certain design considerations, such as language, grammar, voice duration, and interaction naturalness, are consistently prioritized by practitioners, even if not explicitly labeled as “design guidelines.”

  3. Attitudes Towards Harmonisation:

     • Practitioners hold ambivalent attitudes towards the harmonisation of design guidelines: while they acknowledge that harmonisation could improve consistency, they also recognize that the natural evolution of language and the unique technical characteristics of different platforms may limit its feasibility.
     • Certain technical aspects, such as volume and voice clarity, are considered more suitable for standardization, whereas language style and dialogue design require more flexible handling.

• Comparison with Existing Solutions:

  • This study reveals practitioners’ critical attitudes towards design guidelines: some guidelines are perceived as overly rigid, leading novices to follow rules mechanically rather than balancing user experience considerations.
  • Unlike the universal guidelines developed in academia, practitioners emphasize the operability and contextual adaptability of design guidelines.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Practitioners’ responses to design guidelines are significantly influenced by their level of experience: experienced practitioners tend to create more flexible solutions based on guidelines.
  • Platform-specific design guidelines (e.g., for Alexa and Google Assistant) have limitations in practical use, and practitioners prefer to develop their own design frameworks for cross-platform projects.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. The sample size is small, including only 9 practitioners, which limits comprehensive coverage of the VUI design field.
  2. The study did not directly observe practitioners’ work processes, restricting deeper insights into their practices.
  3. Future research could adopt ethnographic methods (e.g., design ethnography) to explore how practitioners use design guidelines in real-world work settings.
  4. Academia should further investigate how to balance the abstraction of design guidelines with practitioners’ diverse needs, especially considering platform constraints and the variability of language in guideline harmonisation.

Conclusion

This study explores VUI design practitioners’ understanding and application of design knowledge through interviews, uncovering key issues such as inconsistent terminology, challenges in applying design guidelines, and debates around guideline harmonisation. These findings provide valuable insights for academia in developing industry-relevant VUI design knowledge and suggest that future research should focus on practitioners’ real-world design processes.