ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 24)

TECHNOLOGY other transaction-oriented services. The unique application design issues that relate to the use of the telephone as the user interface for verbal interaction with automated products and services are the motivation and the subject of this style guide. A STYLE GUIDE FOR USER INTERFACES User interface design is particularly resistant to rigid methodologies that attempt to define it simply as another branch of engineering. One reason is that design goals may readily change — leading to moving targets and ill-conceived functional elements. Another reason is basic lack of knowledge about the broad range of users and the motivations and assumptions that they bring to the interaction. Perhaps the most important reason of all, however, is that we are dealing with human perception and human performance; and humans are notoriously varied, interesting, unpredictable and creative. This means that human users invent all kinds of new and unexpected ways to interact with our designs. The unique constraints of the telephony interface make it especially sensitive to the human factors and usability challenges that are so important to user interface design. “Especially sensitive” means that design flaws that might be tolerated in, for example, a desktop computer application or an automatic teller machine become insurmountable when the sole method of communication is via the telephone. With telephony interfaces, we have to do an especially good job to achieve even mediocre results. Thoughtless sentence constructions confuse. Unnecessary friendliness irritates. Careless error messages cause new errors. Lengthy instrucicmi’s insight tions cause loss of context. Tutorials fail to teach. Poor designs fail. With telephony interfaces, there is no margin of error. Unlike the computer screen that we can revisit when we’re lost; unlike the bookmark that returns us to our previous position; unlike the simple restaurant menu that confines our choices, the words transmitted across the telephony interface have no persistence. Because telephony interfaces are especially sensitive to design flaws, we must exhibit rigorous discipline in both design and implementation. And yet — because the medium is new — there are no clearly established “rules” that ensure success. Instead we must navigate without a map, establishing directions after traveling down dead ends and making wrong turns. This challenge is similar to another creative human endeavor — the craft of writing. And as students of that craft well know, one of the most effective aids is the style guide. Of course, there are no rules that — even applied rigorously — guarantee that one writer will succeed while another fails. But there are general principles of good expression that seem to work reliably for nearly every writer. There are underlying patterns of language that resonate with readers. There are, indeed, guidelines that can be used to find the way toward clarity and professionalism in communication. Such guidelines can be extracted from examples of effective writing. Style guides provide solutions for specific writing problems. These problems appear spontaneously as the writer thinks through and constructs her work. Equally important, style guides establish conventions — of capitalization, punctuation, page layout and outlining — which are important for the unimpeded flow of thoughtful information. The ultimate choice of convention is not so important; in many cases, one solution works as well as another. But it is essential that they be applied consistently throughout, as whimsy or carelessness in the use of style conventions leads to noisy, sloppy and mentally taxing reading. As an analog of the writer’s handbook, this style guide aims to give speech recognition practitioners the groundwork for the basic elements of style that have the most impact on the effectiveness of telephony interfaces. This includes the same principles of expression important to the written word, such as the proper use of tense and mood; the placement of keywords in prompts; the effects of person, gender, number; the declaration of fact without prejudice; and, perhaps most importantly, the clear and simple expression of the here and now. It also expands on these basic principles to organize and codify the dynamic aspects of spoken dialogues — the interactive control over whose turn it is to speak, the communication of state changes that leads the user to construct a meaningful utterance, and, of significant importance, proper management of the users’ ability to accomplish their goals. When building a speech recognition application, it is impossible to predict or test everything that a user will say. Therefore, the most important message to developers is to resist thinking about what the user will say, and to focus instead on what the application can do to move the task forward — regardless of recognized results. Excessive reliance on recognition leads to dialogues that spend more time confirming what the user www.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 24 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 Operations: Small Call Centers, Big Potential Ad Index Contents Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Assessment Tools Recommended Reading Technology: Speech Recognition Special Feature: Best of Show Strategy: Service-to-Sales Success Expert's Angle - High Volume, High Stakes: A Better Strategy for Hiring Experts Angle - Secrets of Recruiting Success/Job Brands: Changing Applicant Reactions to Your Openings Experts Angle - Speech Analytics: Uncovering the Voice of the Customer

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

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