Why Conversation Designers Are More Important Than Ever
People that have been following me for a while know that I like to voice my critiques, it is one of the reason why I write. When people tell me I’m critical I take it as a compliment, because being critical is almost a corollary of being curious. However, I’m aware that can come across as dismissive sometimes.
I’m actually an optimist. I’m very optimistic about the future and especially the future of conversation design. That’s why I would like to share some thoughts with you this week on why we need conversation designers, now more than ever.
The power of conversations
In The Design Of Everyday Things (1988), Don Norman writes:
“It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”
The reason why conversational experiences are so effective and tantalizingly enchanting from a design standpoint is because the way we interact with it is so deeply intuitive to us.
Having conversations is engrained in every fiber of our being. It’s something that binds us all together.
The quote is truly visionary, as Don Norman couldn’t have guessed the unprecedented speed at which the field of conversational AI is advancing right now. He couldn’t have anticipated the fact that we now have AI systems that talk with millions of people everyday. AI systems that can mimic human-like interaction at a level that is nearly indistinguishable from humans.
I say mimicking, because it’s clear these systems don’t really know what they’re saying. And it’s also clear they don’t know what they don’t know, hence the occasional hallucination.
This is where conversation designers enter the story.
Putting people first
When I interviewed Tom Zeller last week, we talked about putting people first. It is a leading design principle in conversation design, because people are at the heart of these experiences, which means a large part of designing is about understanding who you’re designing for.
To some, the conversation designer is regarded as not much more than a glorified copywriter. I respectfully contest that characterization, as it is a multifaceted discipline that operates at the intersection between technology, psychology and language.
Sure, you have to be able to write. But only by understanding the technology in front of you, you can design and shape products that are meaningful and useful to the people that use it. And most important of all, you need to be aware of the deep connection between language and psychology.
To make machines understand people, we need people understanding people.
An example that I’ve written extensively about is when language is the interface, persona is implied.
Designing for good intentions
The role of the conversation designer is changing, but that mustn’t come as a surprise to anyone working for longer than a few years in our space.
With the advent of generative AI, the designer’s control over the end result simultaneously grows and diminishes. AI assistants have more capabilities than ever and your imagination is the limit. At the same time, instead of literally writing every single thing a chatbots says, all of a sudden we need to define the parameters that these systems operate in and then sit back and see what happens.
On that note, I’d like to share a final thought. Two things these new language model-powered AI systems lack are intention and agency.
Intent is about having your own wants and needs. Agency is described as an individual's power to control his or her own goals actions and destiny. It is my firm belief that we don’t need systems that feign intent nor agency. Instead, to design helpful AI assistants, we need to take into account people’s intentions and people’s agency.
It should always be us giving a system the intent and the agency to perform the task at hand. We should design for good intentions, but also mitigate risks or intervene when people intent to do harm.
There’s a reason why this newsletter is called Teaching computers how to talk. We teached computers to talk. Now it is time to start teaching them how to talk.
Jurgen Gravestein is a writer, business consultant, and conversation designer. Roughly 4 years ago, he stumbled into the world of chatbots and voice assistants. He was employee no. 1 at Conversation Design Institute and now works for the strategy and delivery branch CDI Services helping companies drive business value with conversational AI.
Reach out if you’d like him as a guest on your panel or podcast.
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Hi Jurgen, thanks as always for sharing your insights. I've recently watched a documentary called Coded Bias (2020) - recommended, where they focus on the use of AI for face recognition and concerns about ethics and privacy. I wonder how these two issues can be mitigated in conversational AI...