In this third installment of our series on conversational usability, we look at conversational design, an already well-explored area that is still burgeoning with emerging best practices. Conversational design introduces complexity that can be challenging for even the most steeled organizations. Introduce the wildcard factor of voice assistants, and things become more difficult still. After all, in voice-driven interfaces, rather than designing on a visual or physical…

If you’ve been reading about new -- and promised -- easy-to-use page builders, you many not be aware that the Drupal community has been working on a super ambitious visual design tool, Layout Builder, that will be included in the next version of Drupal, Drupal 8.7, scheduled to be released this Spring, 2019. The Layout Initiative, under development for more than a year, is creating a content tool with dramatically more power and flexibility than comparable systems.…

In this second installment in our series on conversational usability, we dive into a relatively overlooked area of conversational interfaces that can have an outsized impact on the eventual user experience that results: information architecture. How information is organized, and how that scheme is presented to the user, make up a fundamental part of building usable and navigable websites. But what happens when we apply those same principles to conversational interfaces…

Intro: About Digital Experiences and Signs (Special thanks to Gerardo Gonzalez and Andy Hawks, engineers at CivicActions, who worked on this project -- and this post -- with me.) “Digital Experiences” are the next big thing someone at your company is almost certainly talking about. These include visionary technology that operates based on rich data that is timely and location-based, interactions between other services and products, and perhaps most importantly:…