Designing Voice User Interfaces

Chapter 3. Personas, Avatars, Actors, and Video Games

AN IMPORTANT DECISION THAT you should consider when designing voice user interfaces (VUIs) on mobile devices is whether your VUI should have a visual representation. This could take the form of a still image, a cartoon avatar, or even recorded video of an actor. In addition, there are nonhuman avatars in the form of other familiar shapes such as monsters, animals, robots, aliens, and so on. Finally, there are abstract visual responses a VUI can show, without using an avatar.

This chapter helps you to decide whether your VUI needs a visual component, and if it does, what the best design practices are. This chapter does not go deeply into details of how to create and animate an avatar; it focuses on how an avatar is used specifically within a VUI system.

In addition, this chapter covers persona design. All VUIs, regardless of whether they have a visual component such as an avatar, will still have a persona.

Personas

There is no such thing as a voice user interface with no personality.

—COHEN, GIANGOLA, AND BALOGH, 2004

In Voice User Interface Design, Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh define persona as follows:

“Persona” is defined as the role that we assume to display our conscious intentions to ourselves or other people. In the world of voice user interfaces, the term “persona” is used as a rough equivalent of “character,” as in a character in a book or film. A more satisfying technical definition of persona is the standardized mental image ...