New conversation design resources for Actions on Google developers

Posted by April Pufahl, Conversation Designer

Creating Actions for the Google Assistant requires a breadth of design expertise ranging from voice user interface design, interaction design, visual design, motion design, and UX writing that we've refined into a single discipline: conversation design.

Today, we're launching a conversation design site that shares this expertise with you, so you can design Actions using the same principles that guide our teams at Google. Our goals are to help you:

  • Craft conversations that are natural and intuitive for users
  • Scale your conversations across all devices to help users wherever they are

If you're new to conversation design, you'll learn the basics of the conversation design process and how to determine whether conversation is right for your Action. You'll also get practical tips on how to:

  • Gather requirements
  • Create system and user personas
  • Write sample dialogs
  • Draw high level flows
  • Test and iterate
  • Design for the ways a conversation can deviate from the most common paths by adding handling for errors and other scenarios
  • Make sure your feature works as a voice only and a multimodal interaction

Finally, we've broken down the conversational and visual components that are used to compose your Actions' responses to the user.

By following our conversation design principles, you'll adapt to the communication system users learned first and know best, and in the process, build better Actions.

Follow us on Twitter @ActionsOnGoogle and join our G+ community https://g.co/actionsdev to keep up to date with more news from our team.