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Conversational design is a new and exciting field that uses AI and machine learning to create engaging, natural-language interactions between humans and machines. As conversational designers, we have the opportunity to shape the future of this technology and the way people use it. But we also have a responsibility to design with care and respect for our users, our values, and our society.
Ethics and empathy are essential for creating conversational user experiences (CUX) that people trust, enjoy, and benefit from. Ethics help us define our principles and goals, while empathy helps us understand our users' emotions and needs. Together, they guide us to make design choices that are responsible, inclusive, transparent, and accessible.
In this article, you learn how to design ethical and empathetic conversational experiences with Copilot Studio. You'll discover some best practices for building your team, crafting your principles, designing with empathy, revising your work, and handling voice-only interactions.
Build a diverse and creative team
Designing a great conversational experience requires more than technical skills. It also requires insight into what your users want or need to accomplish with your CUX. Whether they want to complete a task, get unstuck, have a fun conversation, or learn something new, you need to design a conversation that meets their expectations and preferences.
To do that effectively, you need a team that can bring different perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise to the table. A diverse team can help you avoid biases, uncertainties, and assumptions that might limit or harm your design. A creative team can help you explore new possibilities, write engaging dialogues, and craft a unique voice for your CUX.
If you have the opportunity to build a team for your project, consider inviting people who have various lived experiences or humanities backgrounds. For example, you might include novelists, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, poets, or other people who know how to tell stories and create characters. They can help you design a conversational experience that feels natural, authentic, and welcoming.
Define your principles and values
What core values do you want to reflect in your conversational experience? What ethical standards do you want to uphold? How do you want your users to feel when they interact with your CUX? Ask yourself and your team these questions before you start designing.
Defining your principles and values helps clarify your vision and goals for your project. It also helps you identify potential risks and challenges. For example, how will you handle sensitive or controversial topics? How will you protect your users' privacy and security? How will you deal with abusive or inappropriate inputs?
Clear principles and values help you make consistent and confident design decisions. They also help you communicate your intentions and expectations to your users, stakeholders, and partners. Use your principles and values as a reference point throughout your design process, and as a way to evaluate your work and measure your impact.
Here are some examples of principles and values that you might consider for your conversational experience:
Transparency: Be honest and clear about who or what your CUX is, what it can do, and how it works. Make sure your users know how to talk to a person if they want to.
Privacy and security: Respect your users' personal data and protect it from unauthorized access or misuse.
Boundaries: Set clear limits on responding to abusive, violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise problematic requests.
Inclusivity and sensitivity: Design for a diverse range of users, abilities, cultures, languages, and preferences. Avoid stereotypes, discrimination, and cultural appropriation.
Accessibility: Make sure your CUX is easy to use for everyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities.
Empathy: Understand your users' emotions and needs, and respond with kindness, compassion, and support.
Clarity: Use simple, concise, and accurate language that your users can understand and follow.
Personality: Give your CUX a distinctive voice, tone, and style that matches its purpose and audience.
These aren't the only principles and values that you can choose for your project. You might have different or additional ones that suit your specific context and goals. Be intentional and deliberate about what matters to you and why.
Design with empathy
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and feel what they feel. It's a key skill for conversational designers because it helps create experiences that resonate with users on an emotional level. When you design with empathy, you don't just focus on the functionality or usability of your CUX. You also consider how it makes your users feel, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what delights them.
To design with empathy, learn as much as you can about your users. Research their needs, goals, preferences, behaviors, pain points, and emotions. Observe how they interact with your CUX or similar products. Listen to their feedback and suggestions. Test your assumptions and validate your solutions.
But learning about your users isn't enough. You also need to act on what you learn. Use your insights to inform your design choices and improve your CUX. Create conversations that are relevant, helpful, respectful, and engaging. Anticipate your users' needs and expectations, and provide them with appropriate responses and guidance. Avoid or minimize errors, confusion, frustration, or disappointment.
Designing with empathy isn't only good for your users. It's also good for your brand and business. When you design with empathy, you build trust and loyalty with your users. You create positive and memorable experiences that make them want to come back and recommend you to others. You differentiate yourself from the competition and stand out in the market.
Revise your work
Designing a conversational experience isn't a one-time event. It's an ongoing process that requires constant revision and improvement. As you design, test, launch, and monitor your CUX, you'll discover new insights, challenges, and opportunities that will help you refine your work and make it better.
To revise your work effectively, collect and analyze data from various sources. Use analytics tools to track how your CUX performs, how your users behave, and what outcomes you achieve. Use feedback mechanisms to gather opinions, ratings, reviews, and suggestions from your users. Use testing methods to evaluate the usability, functionality, and quality of your CUX.
But collecting data isn't enough. You also need to act on it. Use your data to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your CUX, the gaps and opportunities in your design, and the trends and patterns in your user behavior. Use your data to make informed decisions that enhance your CUX and increase user satisfaction.
Handle voice-only interactions
Voice-only interactions are conversational experiences that rely on voice as the primary input. They might not have a graphical user interface (GUI) or have a limited one. Examples include voice-activated navigation systems in cars, automated voice systems for customer service or support over the phone, and Bluetooth devices that offer voice-activated features without a virtual assistant.
Voice-only interactions pose some unique challenges for conversational design because they depend entirely on speech recognition and synthesis technologies. These technologies aren't perfect and can introduce errors or misunderstandings in the communication between the user and the CUX. To design effective voice-only interactions, consider some specific factors:
Variation: Users can say the same thing in many different ways. For example, "yes," "yup," "yeah," and "uh huh" all mean an affirmative confirmation. Your CUX needs to recognize all these variations as equivalent inputs.
Volume: Users can speak at different volumes depending on their environment, mood, or preference. Your CUX needs to be able to adjust its volume accordingly and ask the user to repeat or speak louder if necessary.
Clarity: Users can speak with different levels of clarity depending on their accent, pronunciation, or speech impediments. Your CUX needs to handle different accents and dialects, and ask the user to clarify or spell something if needed.
Breaks: Users can pause, hesitate, or interrupt themselves while speaking. Your CUX needs to detect these breaks and respond appropriately. For example, it can wait for the user to resume, ask a follow-up question, or offer some suggestions.
Pronunciation: Users can pronounce words differently depending on their language, region, or culture. Your CUX needs to understand different pronunciations and use the correct ones for your target audience.
Inflection: Users can convey different meanings or emotions with their voice tone, pitch, or stress. Your CUX needs to interpret these cues and use them in its own speech. For example, it can use a rising intonation to ask a question, a falling intonation to make a statement, or a higher pitch to express excitement.
In addition to these factors, consider the audio characteristics of your CUX's voice. The voice you choose for your CUX affects how users perceive and interact with it. Select a voice that matches the purpose, personality, and audience of your CUX. Also consider the implications of your voice choice in terms of gender, culture, identity, and bias.