This foundational 10-week course offers immersive learning and practical experience for all aspiring Conversation Designers.
⚠️ This course is no longer available.
Key Course Outcomes
This course was designed for practitioners, who want to break into Conversation Design and accelerate their career. We focus on helping you get real-world experience, get workplace ready and develop a portfolio, which will land you a dream job as a Conversation Designer.
Real-world experience
Polished portfolio
Employment Opportunities
FCxD Syllabus
This course contains the core body of knowledge, that a Conversation Designer needs to master in order to break into this space. Some key focus areas include:
Understanding the underlying technologies and their impact on design
Design Thinking as applied to Conversation Design
Usability testing and validation
Efficient team collaboration
Performance improvement, versioning, and working on a live evolving product
1.1 What is conversational AI? 1.2 A History of conversational interfaces. 1.3 The conversation designers role. 1.4 Understanding how ML works (intent, utterance, entity). 1.5 First & third party applications (skill, action, chatbot, IVR). 1.6 Hardware ecosystem - embodiments.
Week 2
CAI Product Development
2.1 End-to-end CAI product development. 2.2 Continuous validation and iteration. 2.3 The right fit for CAI? 2.4 Finding and framing opportunities. 2.5 Competitive analysis & benchmarking.
Week 3
Concept Generation & Development
3.0 How to write great ideation prompts. 3.1 Concept generation. 3.2 Evaluating your ideas. 3.3 From napkin sketch to Shrek model, maturing your concept. 3.4 The conversation canvas. 3.5 Sample dialog writing & role-play.
Week 4
Prototyping: Low Fidelity
4.1 Why we prototype. 4.2 What is design thinking? 4.3 Roleplaying and sample dialog writing. 4.4 Wizard of Oz prototyping. 4.5 Remote user testing.
Week 5
Conversation Design Principles & Best Practices
5.1 Paul Grice and the co-operative principle. 5.2 Best practices for voice user interface design. 5.3 Best practices for chatbot design. 5.4 IVR and the future of telephony integration. 5.5 Multimodal, voice first design.
Week 6
Personality Design
6.1 Personality and why it’s important. 6.2 The personality design canvas. 6.3 Expressing with language and tone. 6.4 Expressing visually. 6.5 Expressing with sound. 6.6 A styling framework.
Week 7
Prototyping: High Fidelity
7.1 High fidelity prototyping. 7.2 Testing for usability and accessibility. 7.3 Onboarding to design tools. 7.4 Understanding context, memory, onboarding, and discoverability.
Week 8
Deploy & Evolve
8.1 Engineering 101: versioning, language/localization, dynamic data, feasibility. 8.2 Delivering a CAI product requirements document. 8.3 Performance improvement (feedback loop) and maintenance. 8.4 Working with stakeholders.
