During my lasts six months working at Emergya, I worked as a Product Designer in the first phases of a Conversational Design project for the hotel company Meliá, building the foundations of a bigger product that is currently still being developed and in production. The aim of the project was to improve the efficiency of Meliá's' help center by incorporating a virtual assistant that would solve a percentage of the customers' requests.
The first contact was a one-day kickoff workshop that we organized at the Meliá Headquarters office in Mallorca, where we analyzed the competition, we identified with the skate holders who were the main personas, pain points, and use cases, we divided the project into the different milestones and phases and defined the desired personality of the voice assistant as a starting point for the character guidelines design.
Research
As part of the research prior to the kickoff meeting, we did, among others, a study of the most used words by current clients divided per use-cases based on recorded telephone calls to the Meliá call center. We also analyzed KPIs regarding the user needs and the reason why they need them during the calls to define the project milestones.
Outputs
Based on the conclusions of the workshop, we defined the needs of the project and started to have a better picture of how to approach the different branches of the product: The behavior and personality of the assistant, the division of the milestones, the enrichment of the assistant vocabulary, and the diagrams to define the user flows and fallbacks.
The Style Guidelines
I designed a document where the character of the virtual assistant was defined, as well as good uses and general rules for the behaviour and conversational style.
The Workflows
One of the main challenges was to enrich the AI of the software and give it a foundational structure to start with that would consider every single flow possibility. For each use case, we designed a diagram with all the possible answer options on a conversation. To consider every single alternative, we complement the diagram with a spreadsheet of vocabulary for each response.
Voice Summit Talk
In this context, I did a talk on Conversational Design and Virtual Assistants in Voice Summit, Madrid.
