7NOW VUI

Voice User Interface Design

Project Overview

7Next the R&D division of 7-Eleven found a potential customer market - voice ordering for their new delivery service called 7NOW. Our push was for an easier customer ordering experience for customers and make it more accessible for the physically and visually challenged.

The Challenge

Bringing VUI to a company that hadn’t been innovative in over 30 yrs wasn’t easy. Even though the VP requested it, there were several challenges, one was not getting full support from certain company stakeholders, they just didn’t see the value in it. The second was a dev team that had been working on it for over 4 months without a VUI designer and really didn't have a solid understanding of how to build the user experience.

My Role

I gathered all the information I could about the project, researched what other companies were doing and then created user flows for each intent. By doing this it helped the dev team better understand how it should work. After this, I wrote prompts to fit each intent and its’ steps. As well as, I was a strong advocate for Voice to key stakeholders and explained the need for it, and not just for another way to purchase items but to meet accessibility needs.

Discovery

When I joined the team I quickly saw that even though the team had an understanding of how to build the skill/action, they weren’t sure how to connect the dots. I came in accessed what the major needs were and studied 7NOWs personas.

Define

My next step was to think about the users’ intent while using the 7NOW skill/action on a smart speaker. What would they say? How would the smart speaker respond? How would the conversation go between the two? How would the system work when a user was searching for an item? Responding with one item at a time wouldn’t give the best user experience. So the team and I came up with an idea that spawned from the "Guess Who" game. After thinking through that I started a user flow to define the steps for each intent. After showing the team this they were able to quickly pick it up and move faster to the end goal.

First time user entry

The first five intents flow

Design

I then needed to understand 7-Elevens tone of voice. I needed to bring that same tone into the prompts as I wrote them. After writing them I needed to do several rounds of testing by role-playing with some internal testers. By doing this I quickly learned that people do not ask for items they way you think they would. For example, Red Gatorade was not something I, nor the team thought about. We quickly learned that we would need to add synonym tags to the utterances.

New order prompt flow 1

The customer comes back, has items in their bag and continues shopping.

The customer comes back, has items in their bag and empties the bag.

Outcome

After eleven months of whiteboard sessions, user flows, writing prompts and testing we have created an Alexa skill and a Google action that are live today. We are currently looking to streamline a few prompts and intents, then run more testing, as well as bringing it to the 7NOW app. With in the first week of going live in selected areas we had over 150 orders from a smart speaker device. With the only marketing being through the 7NOW app, our team was happily surprised by those results.