At Big Nerd Ranch, we literally wrote the course on developing third-party apps for the Amazon Echo, a voice-only interface. With Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and others creating SDKs for voice and messaging interfaces, it is critical to carefully design good user experiences for these conversational interfaces.

One of the most frustrating human-to-machine systems is the customer service IVR. Very few people enjoy navigating through complicated voice menus and hoping that the system understands your command. These systems often leave people feeling annoyed, frustrated, and helpless. It is critical that we learn how to avoid IVR problems and design graceful, smart, and satisfying conversational experiences.

In this session, Angie Terrell will walk through the current state of conversational interfaces and human-centered design principles to guide the design of your conversational apps. From messaging apps, which can take advantage of the screen interface, to voice-only interfaces which require natural language processing, you will learn fundamental user-centered design principles to build experiences that avoid frustration and annoyance and provide value.

If you are a designer or developer creating apps for Alexa, Siri, Messages, Facebook Messenger, or other chatbots you will leave this session with practical methods for designing the best user experience for the conversational interface.