Situation
I was a voice designer for a company called Tellme Networks, focused on designing telephony-based services. After our 2007 acquisition by Microsoft, the Microsoft Speech team asked us to help add a network-services capability to the standalone Ford SYNC voice-activated infotainment system. I was asked to lead design for a feature that would provide location-sensitive traffic information at low cost.
This was in the days before widespread data connectivity in the car (or via smartphones), so we were constrained what we could do with a basic cell phone connection. Through a clever workaround, we were able to get GPS coordinates uploaded from the in-car system, but beyond that we were limited to voice.
Task
To design this feature, I followed three key steps:
- Understand user needs. Through lightweight user research, I identified three key pain points where traffic information was useful: a) “I’m stuck, what’s going on?”; b) “Which way should I go?”; and c) “What’s my commute looking like today?”
- Understand the available data. I worked closely with our traffic data vendor to understand what information was available to us via their API; this required comprehending the concepts of “incident” vs “traffic flow” data, and more importantly the counter-intuitive lack of a causal relationship between the two – i.e., just because traffic was showing as slow didn’t mean there was an accident, and an accident didn’t necessarily mean there was bad traffic.
- Design a dialog flow that captures what we need from the user, and presents the best available data in a useful way. Based on the identified needs, I determined that we needed to know the user’s destination, and could then provide the necessary information.
Action
I identified two key design principles:
- Give users control of which way to go – don’t assume that the fastest route is the one they’ll want to take.
- Tell the user how long it’s going to take and why – but without misleading them.
Based on those principles, I designed a dialog flow, including extensive information read-back rules, that requested the user’s destination (or a pre-saved point, to allow for the “commute” case), and then provided the duration of the trip along with a “color” indicator of traffic (“slow”, “moderate”, “light”, mapping to red/orange/green on a traffic map), and an offer of additional details.
Demo
Results
SYNC Services launched in 2009 to positive reviews, and was seen as an innovative differentiator for Ford at the time. By January 2011, SYNC was installed in 3 million cars, and 80% of SYNC owners said they would recommend it.
Over time, of course, dedicated data connectivity and in-car displays made this limited voice-only approach obsolete; however, for its time, SYNC Services Traffic was a unique, innovative solution.