Consider the delta between how Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa features were communicated: Alexa’s value prop was setting timers, playing music, and giving weather reports, while Siri prompted the user to ask anything. …

me·ta·mod·al adjective characterized by several different modes of activity or occurrence, inclusive of the metaverse As we expand the surfaces that we design for to be inclusive of instances within the metaverse or metaverses, we can carry forward our previous learnings from the move to responsive design and multimodality. …

Three years ago today I was on the island of Kauai in Hawaii, on my honeymoon with my husband. It was just the two of us. A few days in, we met a couple from Kansas who got married just a few days before us, also on their honeymoon. …

Conversation designers carefully craft voice interactions to feel as natural as possible, yet we’re still tied to the feasibility restrictions of mandatory device wake words, rendering all interactions fundamentally, well, robotic. — Implicit wake conditions are the key to natural — and even intimate — voice experiences in 2020 and beyond. Currently, wake words alert a device that it should listen to what the person is about to say next, which may contain an invocation which, in turn, is a trigger phrase…

Today, UX and UI designers can download asset packs to modularly build interfaces that are almost immediately recognizable, because of visual norms and established conventions. It’s now totally possible for newly minted interaction designers to build a career by copying and pasting pre-built elements. However, voice experiences lack the established…

I live every day with generalized anxiety and clinical depression. This makes establishing and reinforcing psychological safety critical for me to succeed in my role as a design researcher. By its very nature, a researcher’s relationship to their participant is intimate in a way that few other professional relationships are…

Diversity in tech gets a boost in Toronto with LGBTQ+ Venture Out Conference — Hot on the heels of the Venture Out Career Fest this past February (which we thoroughly enjoyed!) a cross-guild group of Connectors converged on the Venture Out Conference hosted at MaRS in Toronto, which Connected also co-sponsored. The comfort of walking into a conference that you know is conceptualized from…

VR, AR, XR, Mixed Reality—call it what you want— will fail unless we stop repeating this blunder — Virtual and mixed reality has, so far, been heavily positioned as a gaming platform, but that is a mistake. Presenting these new interaction paradigms as primarily for games and escapist entertainment is not only alienating to people who don’t identify as part of the gaming community, but also trivializes the…

The key to a successful voice user interface (VUI) design is managing what lies beyond the happy path. Here are some pointers. Those who own a smart speaker won’t be surprised to hear that when it comes to interacting with voice assistants, users are easily led astray. Without any visual…