4 Ways To Increase User Engagement in Your Voice Skill
Voice assistants, especially Alexa and Google Home, are getting more and more traction. Apple is also releasing its Homepod and it’s predicted that by the year 2020 75% of US households will have a smart speaker at home. Similar to apps in smartphones, developers can create applications („skills“ for Alexa, „actions“ for Google) which then can be activated by the users. In this way you can increase the abilities of your smart assistant, based on your needs. And as with apps for your smartphone, there are applications which provide you a good user experience, but also others with a really poor one. Although voice user interfaces (VUI) are currently still in their infancy, they should offer the same quality as beautifully crafted graphical user interfaces.
I have been using Alexa for quite a while, but I have only seen a few really engaging and entertaining skills. Almost none of them feel like I’m having a natural conversation or make me want to come back. Often enough I enable a skill, use it once and then forget about it. That happens over and over again.
I think if a voice skill is done properly, it has much more potential than the current generation of skills is achieving. That’s why I have taken a look into a field which has been engaging people over centuries: games.
Buzzword ‘Gamification’ — it’s more than points, badges and leaderboards!
Some years ago the term Gamification arose. Similar to buzz words like Big Data, Design Thinking or others which are trending, there are people who do it properly and others who fail. They mostly fail because they don’t understand the underlying psychology and the reason why they actually should do it. The same happened to companies with Gamification.
The first thing which crosses peoples’ minds when hearing about Gamification are points, badges and leaderboards(PBL). But that’s only a fraction of the mechanics a good game consists of. There are also other drivers like epic meaning, social influence or empowerment of creativity.
Furthermore you should never forget about one of the biggest reasons why you play a game over and over again:
You want to improve your skills, see your personal progress and beat your rival.
Let’s have a look at how these different mechanics can be applied to a voice application.
Applying gamification drives to your voice skill
Epic Meaning
Whenever the player believes he is chosen to do something greater than himself, you can call it epic meaning. This happens with forums, wiki pages and open source projects, where there is a group of people who invest a lot of time into something and they don’t expect something in return. Epic meaning is also calling for you whenever you are the hero in the story, which is quite often the case in a game. Let’s say you plan to do a voice trivia game – don’t just create questions, but create a story around it. Let the user become the hero! If you’re not doing a game, give them the feeling that they are part of something bigger. Many of the basic Alexa skills, which I see, are fun fact skills. If that is the case, let the users enter their own fun facts, which will be available to the community as soon as they’re approved. Tell them that their fun fact has been accepted and give them the feeling of being part of your application.
Give them the feeling of being part of your application!
Development & Accomplishment
This is all about the intrinsic motivation like personal progress, developing skills and overcoming challenges. All of them are often quantified by giving you points and badges or showing your rank in a leaderboard. Doing so they reward the intrinsic motivation with extrinsic mechanics. If you want to apply these extrinsic mechanics, you should watch out that they work in a transparent way. If you have a game, it’s rather easy to create a level system or to display a ranking. Given the case you don’t have game, you need to identify the metric by which you can measure the users’ progress. For example if you have a to do list skill you can reward the users with points whenever they complete all to-dos. If you have a skill like an ambient background noise, which helps people to fall asleep, you could reward them with access to sleep stories, if they keep activating the skill on a daily basis.
Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
Whenever users are engaged in a creative process and have to figure things out, empowerment of creativity and feedback is triggered. In your Alexa skill you could give a hint, that they can unlock a hidden feature, if they find the right combination of words.
A perfect system would be one, where a skill creator doesn’t have to think about new content, but the user keeps being engaged while trying out all different combinations – just think of a Lego for voice.
The probability is high that if these guests get their own Alexa device, they will use your skill for demonstration purposes.
Social Influence & Relatedness
This drive incorporates social elements like mentorship and companionship as well as competition and envy. When a friend is capable of doing something extraordinary or owning something special, you become driven to reach the same level. You can create this drive in your application, when it becomes the skill, which people show off to guests, who don’t know about Alexa. They can demonstrate the amazing technology they own and the visitors are envious of it. The probability is high that if these guests get their own Alexa device, they will use your skill for demonstration purposes as well.
Figure out which drives and mechanics fit to your application!
Summary
There are a lot of ways which help you to develop a more engaging voice skill. You need to figure out, which drive and which mechanics fit to your application, read about them in detail and apply them properly. If you need help finding suitable mechanics, let me know at
hello@dominik-bleilevens.de!
Furthermore you can listen to my guest appearance on the Gamification podcast “Spiel aber Ernst“ by Roman Rackwitz & Joerg Niesenhaus in
Episode 3, in which we also talk about applying Gamification to voice! German only.
Subscribe now to Spiel, aber Ernst on iTunes, leave a review and take a look at the Gamification Podcast website!
Useful links
Read more about Gamification fallacies in the slide deck “Top 5 Gamification fallacies” by Roman Rackwitz
Learn about the different motivators, which drive humans in the Octalysis framework by Yu-kai Chou
Dive into voice games and read the article “High-level success factors for voice games“ by Florian Hollandt
