Yenan's Design

Ι TOPIC SOURCE
2018 S, Conversational Interfaces,
IIT Institute of Design

Ι ADVISOR
Jeffery Mau

Ι TEAMMATES
Jinjia Huang, Xiaoqiao Tang,
Yun Yang, Tong Yang

Ι PROJECT LENGTH
14-week Workshop

DESIGN BRIEF

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HEADS UP: This is an exploratory topic of future interaction mode.

For designers of the new generation, learning how to get along with emerging technologies is a must. Conversational Technology is the one on the trend. People are starting to play with popular voice services including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa as well as chatbot messaging services such as Facebook Messenger and Slack bots.

We will explore and understand how humans use conversation to communicate, be productive and experience the world. And We would like to apply Conversational Interfaces to common usage scenarios at Airbnb - expecting there would be some chemical reactions that can inspire us and other designers like you.

Conversational Interfaces

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Airbnb

Natural Interaction
Voice is the most natural way human use to interact with each other.

Low Learning Curve
With flat information architecture, users no longer need to remember various paths to retrieve information.

Hands-free
Voice interface makes people hands-free. It is practical in some situation.

Heavy Information
User need to learn great amount of information from the website and the host. And the communication is through out the whole trip.

Rush Relationship Building
Users/hosts need to know each other in a short time and build good relationship.

Inconsistent Service
The service level of hosts varies, which leads to a expectation gap between hosts and guests.

How to build a chatbot that can serve as a supplement of Airbnb's current offerings is the challenge ahead of us.

VIDEO PITCH

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For those of you who would scroll down to the bottom and browse everything, I highly suggest you skipping the video for now and watch it at very last. You will find more treasure in it, I promise.

PROJECT PLANNING

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Project Timeline

Considering this is an unconditional project which is without a physical outcome and cannot be explained with merely slides. We tried to build a real chatbot based on Google API.ai. And it did not turn out well without coding support. At last we decided to create a video as our final communication piece. And we made this decision at a early stage, which allowed us to shoot our major scenes in a real Airbnb setting while we were really in our vacation in the middle of the project. The advisor was really impressed when we presented our project with a high-fidelity video during final weeks. He highly appreciates our awareness of project management and planning.

SCENARIO EXPLORATION

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The goal of research is to explore and understand how humans use conversation to communicate, be productive and experience the world - Reveal foundational relationship between human conversation and voice technologies - Extend the concept of virtual assistant as the entity model for engagement - Gain understanding of how machine learning plays a role in crafting user experiences

Feedback session

Testing Protocol

Scenario Feedback

VALUE PROPOSITION

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We believe there are three major values for Airbnb to have Abby as its chat bot service.
1. It helps guests solve low-level issues effectively.
2. It's an illustration of hosts' personality and hospitality in another dimensions.
3. It's a method for Airbnb to control the quality of their service in a consistent yet customized manner.

Conversational UX for Airbnb

An exploratory topic on future interaction mode.

DESIGN BRIEF

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