Anticipating Change

One final thought. Before beginning the design process, the designer needs to anticipate that change will occur ”and that the speech-recognition system must be flexible enough to change along with it.

Future-proofing a system requires a certain degree of clairvoyance. The designer must think ahead to the client's future needs, and design the system to accommodate them with minimal reengineering. That means anticipating the use of new technology, introduction of new services, adaptation of the application to new languages, and redesign of customer- facing communications, such as Web sites, advertising tag lines, and corporate logos.

This holds true even if the system is only a temporary solution, because temporary solutions have a funny way of becoming permanent. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, there is a subway station with a large parking lot located very close to the intersection of two major highways. To get people out of the parking lot and onto the two arteries, the engineers erected a temporary solution incorporating several traffic lights, roadways , and a merge lane. To work effectively, the merge lane requires drivers to merge every other car at very fast speeds ”not unlike something you might see at a closely choreographed auto thrill show. It's always easy to spot the new drivers, because they're too timid to merge quickly and inevitably miss the entire light cycle. Even for experienced drivers, this intersection is nerve -wracking at rush hour . This temporary solution ”which the supervising engineer deemed totally unacceptable ”has remained in place for over 20 years .

There's another benefit to designing a system to accommodate future change. The more flexible a system design is, the more likely it is that the client will invest in future changes ”and use the same designer to ensure that the ideas and paradigms in the current system are continued in the new one.