The Challenge:
Healthdirect Australia have been helping Australians manage their health for over a decade. As part of that mission they believe that all Australians should be empowered to manage their own health and wellbeing. Their purpose is to provide valued and trusted health information and services through many channels.
With this in mind we identified some new channels that healthdirect could adopt, with voice assistant and chat-bot channels being of interest. The specific challenges then centred around:
How are users interacting with these new channels currently?
Who are using these devices?
What devices are users buying?
Are users looking for healthcare information and content on these channels?
How can healthdirect use their wealth of content effectively on these channels?
Skills & Methods :
Voice and conversational UX
Human centred design
User testing
Market analysis
Prototyping and an iterative approach
Alexa Skills Kit
Google Actions SDK
Dialogflow
AWS Lambda
The Team:
As Entrepreneur in Residence, I was responsible for developing the initial pitch to the business. This involved a demo of a health search app using voice and a proposed roadmap to explore the technology and build and launch a Minimum Viable Product. The pitch was well received by design, development and tech stakeholders as well as the executive sponsor. A product owner, UX specialist, content writer and tester made up the rest of the core team.
Most of the team had worked together on projects before but that isn’t to say the project didn’t come with some challenges. Moving into a new channel can come with some pre-conceptions and assumptions and also a lot of uncertainty. It was this learning journey that the team and much of the company went on together that made this such an interesting project for all involved. The key was keeping an open mind and not becoming too wedded to any idea or solution until it had been tested with users.
The Process:
Discovery
We first had to discover a baseline for who was using these new channels and what they were using them for. This involved a round of interviews with a range of users of different demographics and technical knowledge. Some used the devices for general information, others used them as a genuine digital assistant, managing their calendars, cooking, music and lights from the device.
One of the most interesting interviews was with a blind user who described these devices as “independent life tools”, capable of helping around the house with a large amount of tasks and delivering content in a much friendlier manner than desktop screen readers.
Across the board we also asked about their interest in health topics on these devices. While they could think of many use cases, most couldn’t point to many currently available. The opportunity for healthdirect to fill that gap had been identified, now we needed to work out what to build!
Design
We had well established design methodologies for traditional UI design but for voice it was a whole different challenge, there’s no visual interface to interact with. So how do you design for voice?
We started by prototyping a technical concept to search for health articles and read them aloud, while this proved an interesting concept and gave us confidence in the technical approach, it quickly highlighted that any content over thirty seconds long would start to lose the user’s attention. It also surfaced that the content would need to be redesigned to be more conversational and able to pass the “one breath test”.
To develop this content we identified a series of subjects that people would be likely to ask their device for information on and settled on Summer health topics. This is something people always need to be aware of in Australia. The next step was to role-play what people would ask the device with both clinicians and users. Role-playing helped us develop a range of questions and fallbacks including being able to ask for the UV rating in your area and also helped us develop a tone of voice and persona for the assistant.
Finally we ran a series of “Wizard of Oz” user tests where users talk to a device but the responses are provided by an unseen human facilitator with a script of questions they can respond to. This really helped to solidify the personality of the assistant ("a trusted aunt" or "friendly nurse”) and put us in a position to build our first Minimum Viable Product.
Build
In the design stage we had built a technical prototype so a lot of coding and technical questions had been answered. There were still some challenges though, we used Dialogflow for our intents and responses in Google Home and Assistant but Alexa required a different technical stack. Fortunately we discovered the Jovo framework which simplified the code and allowed us to write one set of code for both.
The other challenge was setting up a process for non-technical content writers to write new content, edit existing content and train the Natural Language Processing to understand what the user’s intentions are. This required up-skilling within the company but gave the content writers a new set of skills and ability to write for conversational interfaces.
Test and Launch
Before launch we tested with as many people as we could and as many different dialects and accents as we could. This allowed us to train the Natural Language Processing for the assistant to understand a wide range of people and pick up any bugs that existed where the wrong response could be returned to a question.
We launched in Summer 2017 and immediately saw some users talking to our assistant. As these responses came through it became obvious that we would have to track and train the language model for the assistant as the initial weeks and months went on.
The Result:
The result for the business and the team were many-fold, we launched a successful voice assistant, the “What’s the UV rating in…” intent proved especially popular and a good hook to get users asking the assistant more.
Within the business and the team a huge amount had been learned in a small amount of time about a new content channel and the opportunities it may present. Both design and development practices had been put in place for developing further voice and conversational content and finally a whole new content strategy had begun to emerge within the company.
Healthdirect is still developing further experiences in the voice and conversational space and have a range of bots available across Google Home, Alexa, Facebook Messenger, SMS and soon on their phone service.
On Google Home or Google Assistant say “Talk to Summer Health” or “Talk to Healthdirect Flu Advice” to speak to the healthdirect assistants on that platform.
You can install their “Healthdirect Flu Advice” skill on Alexa from the Skills Store.