Advanced Conversational Experience Design

Conversation Design is key in building successful voice and chatbot experiences. This 6-week course offers deep knowledge and skill building for seasoned practitioners.

⚠️ The course is no longer available but you can find the recordings of the first iteration inside the resource library

Course Outcomes

This course is designed for practitioners, who already have some practical experience with conversation design and would like to deepen and systematize their knowledge as well as for professional Product Designers and UX Designers, who would like to transition into this new field.

Practical learning

Experienced tutors

Advanced sessions

Portfolio project

Course Syllabus

This course is optimized for efficient remote learning. Each weekly module includes: 

• required upfront readings
• an interactive online lecture
• supervised group practice sessions
• an individual home assignment reviewed and marked by your tutors

At the end of the course each participant will have designed an end-to-end conversational experience as their capstone project.

Download the course brochure

advanced-conversational-ai-interface-design-course

Week 0

Onboarding and Introductions

0.1 What to expect in this course.
0.2 The course tools and tech stack.

Week 1

Conversational AI Essentials

1.1 Quick overview of past, present and strategic future of conversational interfaces.
1.2 Present industry landscapes: Chatbots, Voice assistants, Hearables, Wearables,  Spatial Computing (AR,VR,XR).
1.3 Machine learning basics: NLP, NLU, NLG.
1.4 Platforms: Alexa Skills & Google Actions.
1.5 Tools: Miro, Voiceflow, Bot society, Google Action console, and the Alexa developer   console.

Week 2

Identifying Opportunities & Early Validation

2.1 Uncovering user needs.
2.2 Identifying Opportunities.
2.3 Ideation (Divergent thinking activities).
2.4 Concept Evaluation (Discussion around product impact / effort sizing & group dot voting).
2.5 Hypothesis driven validation: Identifying risks, designing tests & refining value proposition.
2.6 Rapid prototyping: Personality design, sample dialogs, wizard-of-oz testing, concept development.

Week 3

An Intro to Key Ethics & Accessibility Considerations

3.0 Chatbots for children: Ethical considerations.
3.1 Recognizing exclusion: Finding for who the conversational experience is broken.
3.2 Define belonging: Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity.
3.3 Inclusive Personas: Define and build an inclusive persona.
3.4 The power of participatory design and co-creation: Tactics and techniques.

Week 4

Design Principles, Best Practices and High Fidelity Prototyping

4.1 Discoverability and navigation: How to make users understand what to do and be consistent in navigating through dialogue.
4.2 Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation.
4.3 Applied: Best practices of CUI design.
4.4 Conversation repair: Mitigate the current frustrating experience of conversational interfaces.
4.5 High fidelity prototyping & usability testing.

Week 5

Multimodal Hybrid Interfaces, New Applications & Advanced Techniques

5.1 Location & Context: intro into; on-the-go use cases, the importance of location context (the current and future states), and on-the-go design considerations.
5.2 Multimodal Interfaces: introduction, car infotainment, smart displays & hybrid mobile-to-speaker interactions.
5.3 Multimodal: Build with screen and location capabilities in the user journey.
5.4 Designing for virtual and augmented reality: The other on-the-go assistant.
5.5 AI-assisted design: Include recommendations, prediction, and analysis for more personalized interactions.
5.6 An introduction to open-domain conversational AI.

Week 6

Team Concept Presentation & Design Critique

6.1 All teams present their concept and get mentor review and peer feedback.
6.2 Closeout celebration and certificates awards ceremony.