Part 1 | Part 2
For thousands of years, much of the content that fills our books and today lines our websites has been rooted in the written word. But in recent decades, voice interfaces have grown in both performance and popularity as users begin to seek novel ways to access information, especially through the uniquely human medium of spoken content. How do we adjust to the new paradigm of voice content—copy and media conveyed through sound—when our content strategy and design approaches remain moored in visual experiences? How do our content architectures and technical paradigms need to evolve to embrace the growing momentum behind voice content in customer experiences? As the pandemic continues, sales of smart speakers and smart home systems are through the roof, and user expectations will soon follow.
Giving our content a voice requires a mindset for new conduits of audio and orality. When navigation becomes negotiation, when leafing through becomes listening through, and when fixtures of the web like links, breadcrumbs, and calls to action become a matter of verbal, not visual, affordance, how do we need to adjust our content strategy and design? In this Tag1 Team Talks episode, we sit down with Preston So (Editor in Chief, Tag1 Consulting and Senior Director, Product Strategy at Oracle) to discuss the promising new world of voice content, how it fits into existing content strategy and content management paradigms.
For a transcript of this video, see Transcript: Preston So - Voice Content and Usability part 1.
Related content
- Preston's recent blog posts about voice
- How to classify interactions for conversational interfaces
- Register, diglossia, and why it's important to distinguish spoken from written conversational interfaces
- How we integrated Alexa with Drupal for Ask GeorgiaGov, the first voice interface for residents of Georgia
- Can voice assistants displace screen readers? | preston.so
- Conversational maxims and the cooperative principle in voice interface design
- Can your content speak for itself? Introducing Voice Content and Usability from A Book Apart
- Voice interface design is about good writing, not just good design
- Affordance and wayfinding in voice interface design
- Preston's conversational content strategy series
- Building usable conversations: How to approach conversational interfaces
- Building usable conversations: Conversational information architecture | preston.so
- Building usable conversations: Effective conversational design | preston.so
- Building usable conversations: Conversational content strategy | preston.so
- Building usable conversations: Conversational usability testing | preston.so
- Building usable conversations: The story of Ask GeorgiaGov
- A List Apart articles
- Selected talks about voice and voice content
- Frontend United: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAy6AP-MZ4o
- VOICE Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt6J_N9HmnQ
- An Event Apart summary: https://hookedoncode.com/2020/06/well-said-giving-your-content-a-voice/
Photo by Malte Helmhold on Unsplash