Preston So - Voice Content and Usability

What do you picture in your mind when you think of the word content? Or rather, what do you hear? Today, much of our content lives inside websites, splayed like wallpaper across browser viewports and smartphon e screens.

But chances are that over the past year, youve interacted with at least a few, perhaps even dozens, of voice interfaces: experiences that serve users through aural and oral means rather than through written or print ed media.

These days, voice interfaces are everywhere. We enlist our voices to schedule events on a calendar, plan a get-together, transfer funds between accounts, or order takeout for dinner. Voice interfaces add greater nuance and richness to our interactions with websites, phones, tablets, search engines, smart speakers, smart home systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Their use cases run the gamut, from manipulating switchboards for corporate phone hotlines to navigating websites with screen readers to teaching schoolchildren to read phonetically to staving off loneliness for elders and empt y nesters.

Though theyre rapidly becoming integral to our routines, todays voice interfaces are mostly limited to executing tasks and performing transactions on our behalf. But there are lots of other things we could do with voice interfaces for which we mostly still resort to the web. Demand is poised to intensify for designers, content strategists, and information architects to deliver voice contentrichly structured information transmitted through the medium of voiceespecially as the adoption of voice interfaces ac celerates.

When it comes to delivering contentcompelling copy, intriguing information, or just a dose of breaking newsvoice interfaces still fall woefully behind. Outside of simple requests, users who want to use their voices instead of their screens to browse idly through a newspapers articles, embark on a virtual audio tour of a museums exhibits, or review a small businesss product details are largely out of luck.

Voice content also remains mostly uncharted territory. As humans, interacting with one another by voice comes naturally to us, because speech is among our most primeval habits. By working with us on our own verbal terms, its the machines that have to do what doesnt come naturally to them, along with parsing all the weirdness that characterizes hum an speech.

The growing interest in voice experiences and particularly in voice content puts in stark relief the other challenges surrounding the ongoing trend I call the channel explosion. Today, voice is just one specimen in a menagerie of new conduits for content (like augmented reality, digital signage, and IoT devices) that overturn our browser-friendly biases. For content practitioners and designers, our longstanding focus on the websites and applications we ownall largely visual and bound to devices with screenswill need to adapt to embrace other means of accessin g content.

Working with voice content means handling content beyond the browser, a rapidly emerging reality for teams besieged by growing stakeholder demands. To be successful, we need to prepare our content for every conceivable channel under the sun while simultaneously investing the necessary time to make sure each individual experiencevoice being just one of themis the best it can po ssibly be.

Voice content is possibly the most removed from the content approaches weve long been accustomed to on the web. It means new workflows and new tools to navigate the journey from web content to voice content. Instead of long-form written content, we need succinct spoken content. Instead of visual design, we need verbal dialogues. And instead of visually rooted navbars, we need aurally roo ted flows.

Voice content also scrambles all the neatly defined roles and responsibilities we used to treat as gospel. Because of its deeply interdisciplinary nature, everyone on the content or product teambe they designer, developer, copywriter, usability researcher, or accessibility specialistneeds to be involved in every step of a voice content implem entation.