Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. 

But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Diana Deibel, Design Director at Grand Studio in Chicago, is a Brazilian-American award-winning writer and VUI designer with a background in fictional dialogue. She has designed multi-channel voice-first products, chatbots for healthcare, insurance and HR operations, smart speaker skills, and large IVR systems. She is a national speaker and VUI consultant who has set up voice practices for Fortune 100 companies, among others. In addition to conversational design, she has written and produced for a variety of networks and creatives including “Animal Planet” and “Blue Man Group”. She co-created two TV pilots, now in pre-development with One Bowl Productions, and has had several plays produced with the Modern-Day Griot Theatre Company in Brooklyn (under the name Diana de Souza). She loves learning, puns, and leading workshops on dialogue to help others find their voices.

Rebecca Evanhoe, author and conversation designer, has been developing technology that you talk to since 2011 at companies like Amazon Web Services, Mobiquity, and Shadow Health. She has created virtual patient characters for chat-based learning games, bots for fun and service, and interactive experiences for Alexa and Google Home platforms. Along with her experience in voice and conversation, she earned an MFA in creative writing. She teaches conversation design as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, and she leads workshops in a variety of writing genres, from creative to technical to UX. Her fiction can be found in the O. Henry Prize Collection, Harper’s Magazine, Vice, NOON, and Gulf Coast, among others.