Inspiration

There is no doubt that cats are a popular choice for a pets-in fact, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, about 25% of American families treat these cute, furry cats as home friends. When we welcome our cat to our home, many of us can be very nervous about how to take good care of our angel and will look for information on the internet. It is the reason a voice assistant named Catty is designed. This is an individual project.

Goals

Enhance experience in taking care of cats and reduce the difficulties.

My Role

Conversational Designer

First, let’s find out what people want to learn about cat.

Three participants were recruited from friend connections. Each interview was around 30 mins. Interviews were conducted remotely due to the covid 19 pandemic.

What about interaction?

How does it affect the relationship between owner and their cat?

Description of the observation study

Watch 5 videos of negative interaction between humans and cats in order to understand under what circumstances people will have difficulty or bad experience of taking care of a cat. Then watch 5 videos of positive interaction between humans and cats to understand what factors bring joys to humans and cats. Observe the emotions and behavior of humans and cats in all videos. 

What did I find out from the observation study?

It’s time to meet Catty!

Voice Assistant Persona

After creating the persona of Catty, few sample scripts were written to display Catty’s characteristics.

An interaction model was created to display users’ intentions. Based on the user research, intentions are mainly focused on:

• Cat behavior

• Cat health

• Cat feeding

• Cat grooming

• Cat handling

• Litter box

• Spaying and neutering

• Breed and Type

• Cat Play

Which intent users will go for?

What is the consequence if Catty gets the information wrong?

The next step is to design flow diagrams that illustrate all the potential conversational paths in the VUI system.

How do we know if Catty is gonna work?

Let’s do user testing to find out!

The goal of this user testing was to discover how users experience interaction with Catty. The study aims to focus on three areas: user’s expectation of Catty’s tone and characteristics, the difficulty of using Catty and the perfection of the prompts. 

Task 1 - Click to open prototype

Imagine you have a healthy 1 years old domestic cat. Since you are still a beginner,  you just purchase Catty to learn more about cats. Now you need to set up your cat profile. 

• To understand users’ opinions about Catty’s tone and characteristics. 

• 4 out of 5 participants completed the tasks.  

  
  
  

Task 2 - Click to open prototype

You think there is something wrong with your cat. She/he has been eating less than usual and vomited some hairballs. You are very worried so you decide to ask Catty about it.

• To see if Catty is able to provide a feeling of comfort since health related questions can be stressful. =

• All participants completed the tasks.  

Findings

• Users prefer medium to high personalization.  

• Users want Catty to be covered by more utterances.

• Users were mostly struggling with the technical issues of Botmock. Next time using a low fidelity prototype might be a better option.

• The intro prompt has to be revised to make sure people will actually answer yes intent.

• The instruction of steps can be hard to catch, it can be shorter. 

• Overall, users think Catty’s responses are natural and concise and they liked it.

What did I learn and how can I do it better?

• Designing an AI chatbot is actually very fun.

• It requires designers to be thoughtful and detailed-oriented.

• It’s a long-term project since there are so many intentions and it is impossible to know them all at one time.

• User data can inspire you with new ideas in many different ways, how they speak and how they react.

• Try different user testing methods before starting research to make sure to get as much as insights as possible.

• Communicating with different designers can give you new ideas of designing the utterance.