3 Designing Effective Processes

 

This chapter covers:

  • Organizing a set of user needs according to complexity and frequency and prioritizing them into a milestone plan.
  • Identifying all steps required to fully automate a process flow, then identifying steps that can be removed or replaced in a minimum viable product.
  • Assembling your dream team to implement a virtual assistant.
  • Recognizing parts of a process flow that will be challenging in a web channel, or a voice channel. Devising a flow that solves for the challenges and optimizes for that channel.
  • Assembling a rich dialog response for a web channel and converting this to a suitable voice response.

A virtual assistant is more than just a classifier and some orchestration logic, in the same way that a graphical user interface is more than just lines and styling. A virtual assistant is a complete user experience channel. It requires a careful and thoughtful design to satisfy end users. The quality of your design sets an upper limit on how successful your virtual assistant can be.

3.1      What processes will the assistant handle?

3.1.1   Designing for the most common user needs

3.1.2   Assemble a plan and a dream team

3.1.3   Managing the design process

3.1.4   Cross-cutting design aspects

3.2      Choose the channel you will implement first

3.2.1   How users receive information in voice and web

3.2.2   How the assistant receives information in Voice and Web

3.3      Summary

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