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Determining Content

The purpose of a set of VUI Design requirements is to enable ALL audiences to understand what has been designed. To this end, it is important to provide sufficient useful content layers for the following audiences:

  • Client Stakeholders
  • Application Provider Project Manager
  • Systems Engineers
  • Developers
  • Testers

Information Needs of Each Audience

Client Stakeholders
In preparing content for Client Stakeholders, it is important to answer several questions about an application's design:

  • Does the application meet the business objectives?
  • Does the application interact with any of the client's systems?
  • How is data secured?
  • What information is retained on the application side?

Application Project Manager
The Application Provider Project Manager needs to be able to understand just enough about the application to be able to parse the work into tasks and to be able to track these tasks and facilitate any impediments to progress.

Systems Engineers
Systems engineers need to know IF and WHERE in an application's VUI design host interactions or table references occur. Often, Designers and systems engineers will work in parallel so that the VUI designer is able to know what sort of host interactions or table references will be required to satisfy business requirements. Conversely, the systems engineer will read the VUI design so as to know WHEN, or at what point in a call flow, host interaction(s) or table references will need to happen for callers to progress through the application. Further, systems engineers will need to be able to understand a call flow so they can produce agent routing tables.

Developers & Testers
Though it is probably common throughout the IVR domain for VUI designers and IVR systems engineers to produce their own artifacts, the most useful VUI designs will arguably represent both the application-caller and the application-host (or application-database) layers of an application. It is recommended that VUI designers and system engineers collaborate on such an integrated document so that developers and testers can minimize the amount of cognitive integration and sytheses they must do to acquire a complete picture of the application's design.