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Conversations with Things

conversations with things spot image

UX Design for Chat and Voice

By Diana Deibel & Rebecca Evanhoe

Published: April 2021
Paperback: 320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1933820-26-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1933820-86-6

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Who this book is for

  • Design practitioners involved in creating digital products, who are beginning their journey into conversational interfaces.
  • Developers who have built voice or chatbot projects, but may not be familiar with advanced design – or even what it truly means to design something.
  • Other non-technical members of the team, like PMs and BAs who need to understand the process, and sales reps new to conversational interface products.

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Who this book is for

  • Design practitioners involved in creating digital products, who are beginning their journey into conversational interfaces.
  • Developers who have built voice or chatbot projects, but may not be familiar with advanced design – or even what it truly means to design something.
  • Other non-technical members of the team, like PMs and BAs who need to understand the process, and sales reps new to conversational interface products.

Testimonials

Table of Contents

Foreword by Kat Vellos
Chapter 1: Why Conversation Design?
Chapter 2: Talking Like a Person
Chapter 3: Crafting Trustworthy Personalities
Chapter 4: Designing Prompts
Chapter 5: Defining User Intent
Chapter 6: Documenting Conversational Pathways
Chapter 7: Building Context
Chapter 8: Complex Conversations
Chapter 9: Researching and Prototyping
Chapter 10: Launching the Conversation
Chapter 11: Designing Inclusive Conversations

FAQ

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Diana Diebel and Rebecca Evanhoe’s book Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

    1. What do you mean by “conversations with things”?
      This book is about designing for conversational interfaces—any technology that people talk to, whether they’re speaking out loud to it or typing. Think of things like voice assistants and chatbots, or any interface where conversation is the primary input or output.
      We call these interactions between people and talking technology conversations with things to emphasize that while they mimic person- to-person exchanges, these computerized conversational partners aren’t people. There’s a rundown of these technologies (and a whole bunch of useful definitions) in Chapter 1, “Why Conversation Design?”

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Sample Chapter

This is a sample chapter from Diana Deibel & Rebecca Evanhoe’s book Conversations with Things. 2021, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: Why Conversation Design?

Rebecca: Hey, folks. Does anyone out there know how to make voice experiences more accessible?

Diana: Yes, I heard a great talk about that a month ago. This is something I’m trying to learn more about, too. I’d be happy to share my notes—want me to send them to you?

Rebecca: I’d love to see your notes! Thanks for being so helpful.

This conversation, held over a community Slack channel in 2018, is the origin of our friendship and this book. At the time, we were both about six years into careers in the tech industry. We finally felt like we knew what we were doing—enough to start noticing where the technology was short-changing people, and enough to start getting opinionated about the conversational interfaces we worked on.

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