What is conversation design?

The term “conversation design” is relatively new. When I started in this industry, the more common terms were “voice user interface design” or “dialog design”.

So, what changed? For one thing, we’re building experiences that are no longer only using voice as an input. Conversational user interfaces may be voice-only, text-only, or (as is becoming more common), multimodal.

In a multimodal conversation, you might start by speaking to your phone or device, then swiping, then tapping, and then speaking again. It lets the user decide which interaction mode is best at any given time.

“Conversation design” is an attempt to capture all of these types of interactions under one umbrella. Just as human conversations can include pauses, non-word sounds, facial expressions, and gestures, a “conversation” with a computer can include more than one method.

Although the term is becoming more common, it doesn’t mean everyone is familiar with it. If you’re looking for jobs, or explaining to someone what you do, you may need to expand your description. Without context, people may think you design conversations between people! And as conversation designers, one of our goals is clarity.

One more note: sometimes the term “conversational design” is also used. Personally, I use “conversation design” because it’s the conversation itself being designed; it’s not that the design (or designer) is conversational!

To sum up: conversation design describes the field of designing user interfaces that let people have voice- or text-based interactions with computers.

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Thanks to Adam Elman for earlier discussions on this topic!