With great dialog comes great responsibility

We're some of the best in the biz at solving thorny, intractable design & engineering problems, but even a seasoned code wizard may not feel entirely confident when facing the prospect of crafting a healthy, personable, resilient conversation. Add ethics to the mix and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. How can we even scratch the surface?

Designing responsible conversations is indeed a challenging prospect, but it can be done. In this talk, I build a case for why conversations matter and offer insight into how to assume the duty of care that arises when we engage people in an inherently emotional activity: talking with them. I speak to the benefits of conversational UI, to ground the framework of what we're discussing. I outline some of the powerful emotional components of human communication, and highlight some of the surprising similarities between how people relate to each other and how they relate to their devices.

I then break down the ethical considerations that attend us: issues of transparency, of clarity, and of effectiveness may feel like table stakes to designers and developers, but deciding how to approach them is not always straightforward. Add issues like culture, accessibility, inclusion, and abuse, and the water can feel muddier still. Furthermore, as one of the largest global companies in the world, Microsoft holds a special set of responsibilities: decisions we make casually can have truly global consequences.

This can all feel daunting indeed. How to reckon not just with our responsibilities but with our capacity even to mitigate some of the inherent risks? But over the last 7 years, we have been developing some best practices that can indeed help us as designers and developers to create work that honors those responsibilities as well as the people we are speaking to. In the last part of the talk, I will offer some of these best practices. Some are simple once you know to look for them: graceful fallback, thoughtful errors, relentless transparency. Others are more nuanced and complex: style and tone guidance, persona development, and carefully built principles. Still others are more systemic: hiring people steeped in empathy, and building humility into the design process. In the end, I hope that people attending this talk feel both empowered and hopeful.