Overview
A prototype was developed using Adobe XD’s new voice prototype tool. The prototype was designed to develop and showcase the features the ‘Airbnb Conversate’ would require to provide the correct content and information a user needs when booking an experience. Below are a selection of videos of some of the interesting parts of the conversation.
Prototype Scenario:
A scenario was created for the prototype design based on user interviews conducted in the research stage of this project. Through interviews of Airbnb users, I found that tasting and discovering local food is a really important aspect of vacationing. As a result, the following scenario was created.
'You have booked accommodation for an upcoming trip with a friend to London with Airbnb. You want to have a conversation with the Airbnb voice assistant to see if there are cooking classes available near your accommodation for Saturday the 18th of May.’
Videos
Topic Guidance
A critical step in ensuring meaningful user experience in voice products requires a technique called ‘topic guidance’. This becomes apparent when voice agents asks eliciting questions to get more detail from the user. The more detail a user can give an agent provides a narrower scope of potential answers, which will increase the likelihood of the agent providing the right information to progress the conversation positively. In this video you will see the agent ask a set of eliciting questions to the user, which will allow the agent to subsequently provide the most relevant cooking classes to the user.
Providing Content
Users require a variety of different content to make a purchase online. This can vary from images of a product, refund policies, customer reviews and much more. A conversational agent needs to provide this information to the user throughout the purchasing conversation. In the video below you will see the set information the user requires from the conversational agent, including a feature of sending the images of the chosen cooking class to the users Airbnb profile.
Purchasing With Voice
The research suggests that making a payment, the final stage of the customer journey, is the most uncomfortable for users when using voice devices. This is due mainly to privacy concerns surrounding vocalising card details and having them recorded. In this video, the feature of making a payment using previously saved card details with Airbnb is shown. This makes payments via voice seamless and safe.
Complete Conversation
The above video shows the most unique and innovative features that aim to justify the feasibility of the ‘Airbnb Conversate’ application. To experience the complete conversation and its additional features, the full prototype video is below.