Case 04 · Master’s project

A voice-assistant prototype for booking flights

Designing the personality and conversational flow of a voice assistant for checking and booking flight tickets.

Prototyping and UI Design Tools course · Team project with María Jiménez Dumall and Zeus Ruiz Socas · Voiceflow and Adobe XD. Academic exercise, not affiliated with any airline.

Voice assistant prototype screens in Adobe XD

4

personality dimensions defined

1–3

travellers per booking in the flow

2

prototyping tools: Voiceflow and Adobe XD

01 · Context

An assistant that talks to everyone

The brief was to design a voice assistant for checking and buying flight tickets. An assistant like this talks to all kinds of people and handles very specific data: places, dates and amounts.

The challenge

Keep the conversation respectful and precise for any type of customer.

02 · Design

Personality and conversation

Assistant personality

Defined using Kate Moran’s four dimensions: neutral between funny and serious, neutral between casual and formal, respectful, and pragmatic. Neutral on the first two to make a good impression whatever the customer’s profile; respectful because it’s an airline; pragmatic because the conversation revolves around specific data.

Conversational flow

The assistant greets the user, asks how many people are travelling (1 to 3), confirms every piece of data it collects (travellers, time, outbound or return flight), and asks for a final confirmation before closing the booking.

03 · Solution

The prototype

Thumbnails of the Adobe XD screens and the Voiceflow conversational flow diagram

We prototyped the conversation flow in Voiceflow and the supporting screens in Adobe XD. The result is a complete conversational flow, from greeting to final confirmation, with the assistant’s personality explicitly defined.

My contribution

Team project with María Jiménez Dumall and Zeus Ruiz Socas. I designed and prototyped the full flow.

Also worth a look

UX Lab: method exercises