Designing a persona for voice: give your action a personality
If you work on user experience (UX), the word persona probably conjures up activities where you try to understand your users by creating representative archetypes. But when designing for voice, personas can have a different meaning – one that copywriters or audio producers might be more likely to recognise.
This is quite a departure for designers who are more used to designing for the user on apps or websites. Here at the Guardian we have moved away from using “personas” within UX. Instead we use a methodology called “Jobs to Done”. So why are we talking about personas? Let me start at the beginning. What is a persona for Voice UX Design?The definition of a persona is the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others. Applying this to voice experiences, the term persona is synonymous with the word character, such as ones found in books and films. Voice personas are a methodology to help a company or brand define the language and tone of their voice-based product.
Why should we create a voice persona?
A persona will evoke a distinct onbrand personality and via the replies given will help to shape the overall tone of the interactions. When designing an intent or dialogue for our users, it should be easy to answer the questions: “What would the character say?” and: “Would they really say it in this way?”The goal is to create a personality but not to trick the user into thinking they are talking to a human being. For example, Amazon’s Alexa never refers to itself as a human but rather as digital entity. The overall goal is to leverage the communication system that users learned first and know best: conversation.There is actually a substantive body of research showing that users cannot help but create personality traits and social information, such as stature, behind a voice – even if we encounter them as a brief, recorded sample. Creating a strong voice persona will help guide users to appropriate and helpful interactions with your action or skill.
Creating our voice persona
Crafting a voice persona is a straightforward and rewarding activity, so don’t be intimidated.
When designing our first persona, we set up a workshop for ourselves based on Google’s design docs. We started with a brainstorming exercise to draw out key adjectives to describe qualities the team believed our voice should have. As the Guardian already has a strong brand proposition, we were able to build on that previously established tone. It’s worth thinking about if your persona should be consistent with or diverge from your core brand.From there we explored the length of the jobto-done research and explored if our initial ideas were matching up. Then we created sample conversations still within the workshop to really draw out and challenge our ideas. As a team we came to a conclusion what we would be happy to test and iterate on. This would be one aspect we want to review, evaluate and experiment on going forward.In our first project, we will be using recorded audio, not the synthetic voice of the Assistant. Which meant we needed to choose someone’s voice to be our host. In our case, we were actually looking for two people to help create a more conversational atmosphere. Working with our editorial colleagues, we came up with a short list of potential hosts.Typically one would continue crafting the character’s values, personal details and back story. This is known as a biograph
ical sketch. Regardless if you’re working with voice actors or a text-to-speech software voice, having this sketch helps copywriters write a script that feels appropriate to your brand and your action.Due to the nature of the the project, we would be working not with actors, but producers from the Guardian’s multimedia department. We felt that getting journalists to play a character as if they were voice actors wasn’t journalistic. In order to move forward we took our agreed adjectives list and created a scoring matrices so to find the best-fitting voice for the product. Rating each voice against the key values guided us to our two selected voices. Unsurprisingly we found the available voices on offer were quite similar. Quite understandable really as the Guardian already has an established tone of voice so it makes sense that any voices we found from within the Guardian would take on and embody the values of the Guardian. With all that said using already established voices from within the Guardian makes a lot sense and brings with it the familiarity of the brand and hopefully brings the trust within to a new product.
Useful Links
How to create a persona for your skill
How do I get started with persona design
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