The Habits of Highly Effective Speech Development Teams: What You Dont Know May Be Hurting Your Proj

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The Habits of Highly Effective Speech Development
Teams What You Dont Know May Be Hurting Your
Projects

• Melanie D. Polkosky, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
• Social/Cognitive Psychologist

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Presentation Goals

• To identify 4 team interaction patterns that
  promote negative outcomes with speech
• To evaluate whether a specific development team
  has characteristics of suboptimal decision-making
• To identify strategies to improve decision-making
  and, in turn, the success of speech deployments

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Development Teams, Decision-Making Speech
Outcomes

• Teams make numerous decisions in designing a
  speech application
• Decisions influenced by business, technical and
  user requirements
• Decision-making involves prioritizing competing
  requirements
• Successful speech deployments depend on usage of
  an application (prioritization of user behavior
  over other issues)

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Research Team Interaction Often Leads to Poor
Decision-Making

• Teams mention and repeat shared information that
  all team members know more than unshared
  information only one member knows
• High status team members contribute more
  information than low status members
• Communicating shared knowledge increases a team
  members status
• Team members may deliberately repeat shared
  information to gain status
• (Wittenbaum Bowman, 2005)

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How might speech development teams make poor
decisions?

• A majority of team members have shared, but
  inaccurate information about user behavior and/or
  needs
• High status members have inaccurate or little
  knowledge about user behavior
• Low status members have significant accurate or
  unique knowledge
• A low status member (or no member) represents
  user behavior and needs

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Examples of Incorrect, Shared Knowledge about
User Behavior

• Users need to be told to listen to prompts (e.g.,
  please listen carefully, our options have
  changed)
• You need to explain to users how to speak in a
  directive manner (e.g., for this, say that)
• Getting an error recovery prompt means the
  application is failing
• All users barge in and hang up on systems

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How do I know if my team is likely to make poor
decisions?

• The development process allows no or minimal time
  for real user input
• The team includes no members with a behavioral
  science background (eg., linguistics,
  communication)
• The team includes only low status members with a
  behavioral science background
• A majority of team members have technical
  backgrounds
• A majority of team members agree on inaccurate
  information (or have minimal info) about how
  human conversation occurs

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What should I do to improve my teams
decision-making?

• Find ways of getting or increasing real user
  input and feedback
• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Cognitive walkthrough
• Usability testing
• If you are a high-status member, ask lower status
  members for input during discussions
• If you are a low-status member, share your unique
  information with other members (esp. high-status
  ones)
• Advocate for user-centered design processes in
  your projects

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What should I do to improve my teams
decision-making?

• Make sure your team includes people with
  divergent backgrounds (esp. behavioral science,
  communication, linguistics)
• Learn more about normal human conversation and
  social behavior
• Keep track of how many decisions are made that
  favor business or technical needs over user needs
  (eg., to maintain an existing business process,
  meet schedule, or due to technical constraints)