Workshops
Rebecca’s Conversation Design Workshop Series
Overview
6 to 8 workshops, depending on what your group wants to learn
Each workshop is a 1 -3 hour session, depending on how deep your group wants to go
I teach virtual or in-person. Either way, I’m there, live, delivering great content, leading useful activities, and responding moment-to-moment to your group’s questions and input.
Bots mimic human conversation. So shouldn’t we understand what they’re trying to imitate? There are key ideas in linguistics that illuminate our work as conversation designers: turn-taking and the speech chain, accommodation, prosody, repair… These basics give you a starting point for your bot.
Linguistics 101
Personality Design
Bots need carefully designed personalities — not just to capture a brand’s vibe, but to set user expectations and build trust. The wrong personality doesn’t just feel wrong; it changes how people talk to the bot, and increases the chances of failure. I can help your team create and document a personality that’s consistent, effective, and unique.
Prompt Writing
Everything a bot says, under every condition, needs to be carefully crafted to be accurate, clear, and concise. And maintain low cognitive load. And capture the right tone of voice. And give the user a clear sign it’s their turn. And provide navigational guidance, but not too much. I distill my years of writing expertise into practical, concrete strategies for creating prompts that work.
Training Data
A bad bot doesn’t recognize what people say. A good bot is flexible enough to let people make their request any way they see fit. To make a good bot, you need to understand the variation in how users make requests — and it’s probably more than you think. I can wrangle training data so that it aligns with what people are asking for (and I can teach you how to test it, too.)
Conversations put together what people say and what the bot says. Flow diagrams capture all of the supported pathways that bot can handle, and all the logic that can govern what a bot says and when. In conversation, context is everything, and I can show you how to start to map that context.
Conversational Pathways
Spoken conversations and typed conversations require different design decisions. And the landscape changes even more when you’re working on a multimodal conversation that allows voice, text, and touch inputs. Plus, each type of interface has its own accessibility concerns. I’ll walk you through it.
VUI vs. GUI
When two people talk, conversation repair happens every 84 seconds. It’s a normal and essential behavior. But bots usually drop the ball. I teach a full toolkit of repair strategies, and show you how to understand the kind of repair that’s needed, and how the bot should execute it.
Conversation Repair
Conversation designers have special techniques to test early-stage products, and different methods for mature products. I teach a full range of low- to high-fidelity prototype methods, and best practices for conducting testing sessions.
Prototyping and Process
Every team has different stuff they want to learn. I’m an experienced teacher, so I can put together custom sets of concepts, talks, and activities to target exactly what your team needs.