Workshop type: Online workshop

Like any other designed outcome, good conversational experiences don’t happen by accident. Whether you'e augmenting your skills or shifting your career toward voice apps and chatbots, you'll need additional tools, abilities, and product methods. Come dive deep into the new world. Conversational interfaces are powered and constrained by hard- wired psychological, linguistic, and environmental boundaries that make even state-of-the-art conversational technologies a challenge to implement successfully. Mapping out and structuring language- mediated interactions and creating meaningful intents and system responses require unique approaches to solving customer problems. Whether happening in voice or text, through a smart speaker or SMS, conversational interaction is rich and complex. We will cover : * The differences in language-driven software, with a focus on AI systems, from web and mobile * The current limits of these systems and platforms and how they shape design * What conversation and multimodality mean within digital products, and how small changes in affordances change a design * The impact of human psycholinguistic limitations on digital design and language processing * How customer behavioral insights and cultural norms shape conversation design decisions * The roles of interaction design, information architecture, and what good experience feels like * Strategy pitfalls, and the right kinds of problems to solve with language-first * Guidelines for creating effective intents, avoiding interaction pitfalls, and handing the complexities of language * Tools, methods, and perspectives to take away and apply * Practical, fun, and creative team exercises to envision, design, prototype, and polish a fictional conversational app

In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: we can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice design successfully in an era of complexity and rapid change, we must get better at planning. To start, we must let go of “the plan” and embrace a dynamic way of planning that’s social, tangible, agile, and reflective. We must engage our colleagues in business and technology to align use cases, prototypes, and roadmaps with culture, governance, and process. In order to design sustainable products, services, and experiences, we must also design the context. In this workshop, we’ll mix presentation and conversation with “planning together” exercises that invite us all to share stories, solve problems, and invent better tools for information architecture and strategic design. Topics covered in this half-day workshop include: * Why planning is central to information architecture and user experience. * The relationship between strategy, architecture, design, and planning. * How to integrate planning with Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking practices. * Tools and methods for individuals, teams, and cross-functional collaborations. * How to make a business case for planning and strategic design. * Who (which roles and departments) should be involved in planning. * How to get better at estimating cost, time, and risk. * When you should be willing to change goals, objectives, and metrics. * How to plan while implementing, improvising, and learning.