“Voice-First Interfaces in a GUI-First Design World”: Barriers and Opportunities to Supporting VUI Designers On-the-Job

Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are currently experiencing rapid growth as commercial devices like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple Homepod are adopted by users. However, due to the pace of this growth, the tech industry has had to adapt quickly and vigorously to keep up with demand. Due to this, we currently have limited understanding of the environment of VUI design in industry, including the various multitude of practices and tools that are used. We also have a limited understanding of the barriers VUI designers currently still face. To address such knowledge gaps, we conducted a large-scale online survey to explore the design practices employed by VUI industry designers on-the-job, and the barriers and needs of VUI designers. We found that despite the availability of a wide range of guidelines, textbooks, tools, etc, there are significant gaps in the adoption of these tools within VUI industry design, and that designers rely on their previous experience in developing GUIs when designing VUIs. Based on our survey findings, we provide recommendations for how the HCI community may direct research efforts in developing tools to assist designers in overcoming existing barriers and build usable and adoptable VUIs.