Onboarding Users to a Voice User Interface : Comparing Different Teaching Methods for Onboarding New Users to Intelligent Personal Assistants

Abstract: From being a fictional element in sci-fi movies, voice user interaction has become reality with intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Sir iand Google’s Assistant. The development opens up for new exciting user experiences and challenges when designing for these experiences. This thesis has aimed to investigate the user experience of different ways of onboarding new users to intelligent personalassistants. The process has included interviews with experienced users, a test of a Google Home for three months and a wizard of oz (WOZ) test. The interviews and the long term test was done in correlation with a literature study to determine how users interact with an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) their flaws, benefits, what added value they have etc. The goal of the WOZ test was to compare two different teaching methods during the onboarding of a new user. The methods were a voice tutorial by the IPA and a visual interaction on a mobile device. The outcome was to see if the users memory retention was different between the two methods for features learned during the test as well as the users opinions of the two different methods. The results from the interviews show that the benefits of using an IPA is in situations where it reduces friction, e.g when both hands are occupied. They also showed that there are still issues with IPAs and there is a long way to go before they can a accomplish a more human-to-human like conversation. In the WOZ test the results showed that there were no significant difference in user remembrance of learnt features between the two teaching methods. However the user insights showed that the majority of users would like to have a multimodal interaction, a combination of voice and visual interaction when being taught to use an IPA.