Conversation Design: SME work
Apart from my day-to-day work at IBM as a content designer and conversation designer, I had the opportunity to present at conferences, teach, and participate in a working group as part of the IBM AI Design Guild. All of these experiences enhanced my understanding of AI in experience design and allowed me to further my expertise in this emerging field.
IBM AI Design Guild - Conversation Design Working Group
The AI Design Guild was created for IBM designers who wanted to better understand how AI can be leveraged across design disciplines. The Conversation Design working group was tasked with creating a document that would educate the designers of IBM as they work with AI technologies, especially with conversation interfaces, and to share a company-wide point-of-view within our products and services to enhance user experiences and provide differentiated capabilities.
As part of this team, I led the effort to create a glossary of terms that would be adopted across the enterprise with the goal of standardizing terminology for the nascent technology.
“I recommend Patty for her work on training initiatives related to digital assistants. She has a deep understanding of the design process, and her focus on emphasizing good user experiences has been invaluable.”
“Patty led the efforts to transform the content for the main conversational UX design portal as well as for a glossary of technical terms. She has a talent for clear and engaging content. ”
UXPA Annual Conference Presenter
I was invited to join IBM colleagues Jon Temple, Design Principal, UX Design Creative Director, and Jason Telner, Senior UX Researcher and Designer, to present on the basic concepts of conversation design at the June 2022 UXPA International conference.
“Patty’s participation was critically important to providing course legitimacy. Her interactions with the class were great. She listened, was patient and helpful.”
UXPA Short Course Instructor
Based on the success of our presentation at UXPA, the organization asked us to restructure the presentation into a series of four one-hour classes, presented in November 2022.
My role was to teach the concepts of conversation design. I reworked the conference presentation to make it more interactive, developing exercises that asked class participants to imagine they were creating a chatbot for a Pet Supply Store. Exercises included mini-Design Thinking sessions to gain an understanding of client expectations for a chatbot, questions consumers would ask a chatbot, and the creation of intents and utterances. Then, based on those intents and utterances, we started to design conversation flows. One of the most engaging and interactive aspects of the course was a pop quiz that I used to reinforce the concepts of successful conversation design.
