Iterating voice user interface designs

My role: Senior user researcher

Team: Product manager, designer, technical lead and developers, operational delivery managers.

 

Context:

Based on priors from a recent discovery for a hotel booking platform, my team planned to build a new interactive voice response tree for when hotels sought support by phone.

Brief:

Test and improve the newly designed interactive voice response tree, so that the hotel users chooses the right option to solve their issue, first time.

Outcomes

  • Improved and simplified voice user interface for hotel users to access support.

  • Increase collaboration between product and operational teams. 

  • Trained another researcher, a designer and product manager on a new user research methodology to test interactive voice response.

  • Established a design-driven approach to developing the interactive voice response for hotel support. 

Process

Based on previous research into how hotel users categorize their support issues, we designed a new phone voice tree to allow users to make the right selections first time.

During testing, I asked hotel users to recall previous reasons for contacting support, then to ‘make the selections’ in the voice tree that made sense to them.

We iterated the tree as we tested and learned.

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I first pilot tested the method with some local hotels. Our designer acted as the phone voice, while the participant made selections on a print-out phone.

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Confident with the method, we then scaled this up to two rounds of wizard-of-oz remote testing, with our designer speaking the tree over the phone to hotel users (for payments, say 1…’).

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Finally, I set up the product manager and designer to conduct a round of in-person research using a sandbox version of the phone tree. This enriched the teams’ learnings further by viewing participant’s visible reactions.

I was able to run and share this analysis remotely as the research rounds progressed.

I used the tool ‘Treejack’, by Optimal workshop, to analyze the success rate of users completing the flow.

(Example treejack study build)

(Example treejack study build)

(Example treejack analysis dashboard)

(Example treejack analysis dashboard)