BBC Voice User Interface

Mapping and designing the BBC’s first emergence in to the world of voice activated UI

Context and brief

In the early stages of voice devices becoming mainstream consumer products the only way a customer could interact with the BBC was through TuneIn Radio.

Our clients wanted us to help them start creating their own space in the new world of voice user interfaces (VUI).

Understanding VUI

As it was so early since this became a mainstream product there was still a lot to learn about it and how to design for it.

I researched through articles, blogs and books to gather as much information as I could on how to design for this space.

The most useful resource I found was the O’Reilly book by Cathy Pearl called “Designing Voice User Interfaces”.

VUI Concepts

As we started trying to explore areas to design for we realised the scope was (or at least at the time seemed to be) endless!

To avoid a serious case of scope creep I set out 4 main concepts for us to focus on:

  • Direct search handling

  • Explore (help)

  • Adjacent content - “What’s next?”

  • Notifications

I created hypotheses for each of these and specified the implications each would have on the MVP.

These were subsequently presented to the client to get approval before we began the work.

User flows

Once we had the concepts agreed by the client I set about creating the basic user flows needed to complete the key tasks.

Sample dialogs

From my pre-project reading and research I found that one of the biggest aspects to tackle in VUI is error-handling.

To work on this I teamed up with a copywriter to create sample dialogs. We used these to bring the user flows to life and make them feel more conversational.

We went to the BBC offices with our printed out scrolls of sample dialogs and conducted a workshop to highlight all key error-handling scenarios.

Tackling abuse

Another new aspect was creating scenarios where the user verbally abuses the BBC’s VUI skill. The challenge was to find ways to deal with this whilst remaining on brand.

Working with the copywriter, we set out 3 different ways for the skill to tackle abuse when it was encountered:

  • “I can’t answer that”

  • Offering an alternative outlet for the question

  • Using personality to fend off the abuse

Results

We handed over our work and recommendations and their in-house team took the project on from there to create the BBC Sounds VUI experience for all voice devices.