Toolkit
Most Conversational UIs (CUI) today are designed only for the masses and exclude the minorities. Designers working on these CUIs aren't
We came up with a Toolkit consisting of worksheets, cards and a set activities to help Conversational UI designers establish their design space better. With our toolkit CUI designers can now consider Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity into their design decisions.
Product Designer
Activity cards designed to help Designers brainstorm various aspects of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity during the Ideation phase
The product team collaboratively works on defining the problem. The worksheet is intended to help designers take into consideration the target user groups, their use cases and external factors effecting their users. Doing so in the first step would help the team think about the JEDI aspect of their product right from the start.
Designers now role-play as users from the excluded user groups and note down the friction points between Human-Human communication and Human-Bot interaction.
A person recovering from eye surgery might temporarily have limited or no vision. Another person might face this barrier in certain environments, like when dealing with screen glare out in the sun. How would your product adapt to this range of people and circumstances with similar needs?Building a persona spectrum of people with temporary or situational impairments helps us create more equitable experiences.
Using the worksheets completed in the previous steps, now designers can conduct user interviews with people who fit their requirements. Incase a person with a permanent disability isn't available for an interview, designers can recruit people from their respective persona spectrums to get credible insights.
We started with a broad Design prompt
that went along the lines of..
"How can we make Conversational UIs
by, for and about
Justice, Equity, Diversity
and Inclusivity?"
and that began our journey
of finding the best solution
Unclear and Non-directed dialogues overwhelm the user. Users find it frustrating when a CUI ends the conversation abruptly.
CUIs fail to be versatile and adaptable as they do not account for variations in personal characteristics and emotional states.
Biases of all kinds: cultural, social, racial, etc., exist in the datasets used to train the CUI’s as they are designed to work best for the majorities.
CUIs are not designed considering the context of the user. CUIs fails to provide recommendations of restaurants with wheelchair access depending on their user.
The prompt was too broad and we were asked to narrow it down to a specific use case and target audience given the project timeline and limited resources. We spent countless hours brainstorming just trying to find a small segment within JEDI for conversational UIs but found that there were too many moving parts to the problem and selecting one was turning out to be impossible.
We noticed that every team working on this design prompt was struggling to find with choosing a direction for the project. The lack of resources online the entire process much more difficult. Hence we decided to pivot from solving for a specific use case to helping designers behind these conversational UIs throughout their entire design process.
We conducted research across designers from various levels of expertise in this field and mapped out their emotional journey to synthesize research observations and reveal deeper insights.
We noticed a recurring pattern in our interviews where a majority of the designers faced significant difficulty narrowing down the problem space and during their research. Designers also could not fully realize what Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity look like in terms of designing a Conversational UI. This validated our assumption on the need for something to help CUI designers.
Using insights from our user research, we worked on creating 4 revisions of prototypes. Ranging from Worksheets, Cards which focused only on one step of the entire design process to finally ending up with an entire toolkit aimed at assisting Conversational UI Designers across their entire design process.
The JEDI toolkit is being offered in two main mediums, Print and Figma Template for teams working in-person and remotely respectively. The Printable version is optimized for being printed on an A3 sized sheets and the Figma template was chosen over Miro taking into consideration the team size limitations on Miro.
