Revolution or Evolution? Speech Interaction and HCI Design Guidelines

The evolution of designing interactive interfaces has been rather incremental over the past few decades, largely focused on graphical user interfaces (GUIs), even as these extended from the desktop, to mobile or to wearables. Only recently can we engage in ubiquitous, ambient, and seamless interactions, as afforded by voice user interfaces (VUIs) such as smart speakers. We posit here that recent speech engineering advances present an opportunity to revolutionize the design of voice interactions. Yet current design guidelines or heuristics are heavily oriented towards GUI interaction, and thus may not fully facilitate the design of VUIs. We survey current research revealing the challenges of applying GUI design principles to this space, as well as critique efforts to develop VUI-specific heuristics. We use these to argue that the path toward revolutionary new ubiquitous conversational voice interactions must be based on several evolutionary steps that build VUI heuristics off existing GUI design principles.