Voice User Interface Design for Natural Language IVR Systems
Nuance
The Work
I worked for Nuance as a senior conversational designer. In this role I was responsible for all aspects of conversation design, user research and evaluation for the IVR systems for numerous Fortune 500 clients. My responsibilities on these projects included:
Conducting call center visits, interviews, focus groups and observations to define user needs.
Writing IVR design requirements.
Leasing design of NLU intent collection through data analysis and collaborative data tagging.
Completing user journeys and written and recorded sample dialogs to define the caller experience.
Creating high-level and detailed system call flows.
Writing all system messages.
Creating detailed voice user interface specifications.
Conducting usability testing of IVR systems.
Performing performance analysis of existing IVR systems through call listening and tuning data analysis.
Tools included Nuance Application Studio, Visio
The Projects
These are examples of several of the project that I worked on at Nuance.
Aetna
I was the lead conversational designer for a major redesign of the IVR for Aetna health insurance. The goal of the redesign was to improve the experience of Aetna callers by streamlining their caller experience and providing easier access to their health insurance information. The illustration below shows one of the (many) call flows for this system.
AT&T IVR Performance Analysis
For AT&T I conducted a detailed performance (tuning) analysis of their IVR. This involved:
Listening to recorded calls of users calling the IVR to understand caller behavior and identify call flow issues.
Collecting and analyzing thousands of sample utterances from the system, and working with speech science to calculate speech recognition performance metrics.
Providing a set of recommendations for changes to the system messaging, call flow and speech recognition parameters to increase caller satisfaction and system performance.
Citibank Usability Testing
For Citibank I conducted a usability test of their existing IVR. This test involved recruiting Citibank customers and having them call into the IVR to get account information and perform banking transactions. I monitored these calls while they were occurring, and interviewed the participants after the call to get their feedback on the experience. All of the feedback was compiled into a report providing recommendations for improving the call flow and messaging of the system.
Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield
I was the lead conversational designer for the Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield IVR. As lead designer I was responsible for doing user research, defining system requirements, creating all system call flows, writing system messages, and documenting the design in a voice user interface design specification.