6.4 Persona Definition
| With some idea of the kind of persona that is suitable for your application, you need to define a specific point of reference to anchor the persona in the minds of all those who have a hand in creating the language experience of the application.[1] This includes dialog designers, prompt writers, voice coaches or directors, the voice actor, and the marketing department of the company deploying the system. This common point of reference is a persona definition document. This resource includes at least the following components:
A photograph can also be a useful visual tool to help bring the persona into focus. Once a potential voice actor is chosen, audio samples of hypothetical dialogs between a typical user and the application should be recorded. These samples will serve to demonstrate how the persona will perform in the context of an interaction between the user and the system and should answer any questions as to the persona's suitability. Such recordings are particularly useful to make sure that the various stakeholders in a project have the same assumptions about what the final system will sound like. One of the key benefits of starting with a persona definition has to do with ensuring a consistent user experience. By serving as a sort of "style guide," persona definition helps ensure a consistent linguistic experience throughout the interaction, especially where the wording of prompts is concerned. Imagine, for example, a banking agent in his early twenties from Flagstaff, Arizona. He might ask for a caller's patience by saying, "Hold on while I look that up" or might request repetition of an account type by saying, "Sorry, what account was that?" It would be unrealistic, however, for such a person, especially in the same conversation, to pose a question as grammatically self-conscious and as socially distant as, "To which account do you wish to transfer funds?" (as opposed to a more natural, context-dependent wording such as, "And the account you want to transfer to?") These prompts differ sharply in register, a topic that is covered in Chapter 10. For the present, however, it is enough to note that these prompts clash in the social cues they project. In effect, their incompatibility undermines the coherence of the personality that users are bound to infer. In general, people prefer dealing with personalities that are identifiable and consistent over those that are confusingly unpredictable and inconsistent. Social psychologists Reeves and Nass (1996) assert, "People like identifiable personalities… . Quick assessments are valued, and undiluted personalities are more quickly and accurately considered. Complicated people are just that: 'Who knows what they'll do next?'" Consistency of the user's experience with the interface depends in part on a consistent persona. There is another benefit to defining a particular persona for your interface. It provides the prompt writer or team of writers with a point-of-reference tool for keeping the language experience familiar. By "familiar" we do not necessarily mean informal. Rather, we mean familiar in the sense of the communication system that users are most intimately acquainted with: everyday conversation. In other words, VUI designers should take full advantage of what is already familiar to users. Prompts that do not reflect conversational norms such as, "An error message has been generated" do not flow from a sociolinguistically familiar persona. It is easier to capture familiar, everyday spoken language if you stay focused on what a socially and linguistically familiar persona might say. |
