Insight from Walt Tetschner

Have been engaged in a constructive email back and forth with Walt Tetschner. It started out nicely enough with him sending me a compliment about a piece I had recently published in TMCnet titled Treat Human Humanely and They Might Just Like IVR, a gesture I appreciated very much.

In the compliment, however, I detected what I thought was a bit condescension from Walt in him saying that he was glad to see that I had "found religion" by championing good VUI design. Needless to say, I pointed out to Walt that I had been engaged in championing good VUI design in my writings and in practice most of my professional life, etc., that it was strange that he would be glad to see me champion good VUI when the gethuman project had only bare bones advice in the web site about good VUI, etc., and the exchange went downhill from there for a few rounds.

But the back and forth took a sudden constructive turn when we started talking about the reasons why VUIs out there are so awful. My contention was that there are not enough skilled people out there that know how to do good VUI and that the vast majority of projects are badly managed. Walt however pointed out that even when good designers are engaged, the end result is often still awful. And he pointed to the attitude of call center managers who view callers as the enemy and who communicate such an attitude, subtly or otherwise, to everyone around them, including the VUI designer, who may very well come to the project wanting to produce the best interface ever, but then gets hammered and demoralized into accepting various mutilations of their design to the point where he/she no longer cares as long as they get paid and they can move on....

The insight is interesting and I need to think about it carefully. I have interacted with enough call center managers to grant that the proposition has merit, but I need to think more about whether the main cause is really about call center manager attitude, and if so, what that means in terms of developing a reform strategy....