My Adventure Book

Follow your own journey with My Adventure Book available on the Google Assistant platform. Listen to Booker narrate a story and make choices that influence the outcome. The goal? Try and find all three special endings!

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Design process

Conversational flow

Mapping the conversational flow is one of the most important tasks for a conversation designer take on. For My Adventure Book, the conversational flow resembles a tree. In the average case, a user will listen to the story and choose the next step based on the prompt. One intent branches out into two and this cycle continues yielding a tree-like conversation flow.

There are many exceptions that must be handled however; designing for these edge cases is what we conversation designers live for after all! In the case of My Adventure Book, users may veer away from the “happy path” to ask the narrator to repeat part of the story or they may ask to hear the rules again. These cases, although not pictured, are perhaps the most important aspect involved in the creation of conversation flows.

Prompt design

One major process involved in the creation of My Adventure Book was prompt design. I define prompt design as the deliberate construction of phrases to be uttered by the users. In reference to prompt design, two notable constraints should be considered: phrase uniqueness and ease of articulation.

Phrase uniqueness

To avoid confusion, prompts should use unique triggers. Incorporating context may help mitigate this issue however, prompts with unique training phrases vastly simplify the design process. For instance, at the beginning of the adventure the player can search inside an apartment for evidence. Later on, the player may come across a warehouse that can also be searched. Instead of prompting the player with a general phrase,

“Do you want to look inside?”

I employed more detailed prompts to encourage the player to utter something specific

“Do you choose to search inside the apartment” or “Would you like to search the warehouse?”

Ease of articulation

Another constraint involves considering how challenging it is for users to say a given phrase. As designers, we are responsible for how users interact with our products. Poor design WILL leave users frustrated. When users are provided with a choice, it is important to realize that they will most likely select an option using the same phrasing they were presented with. Therefore, phrases should be strategically crafted to be simple to vocalize.

“Read aloud every word that’s intended to be part of the customer-facing design.”

Erika Hall, Conversation Design

Making an intent simple to vocalize means avoiding tongue twisters and unfamiliar words. For example, the prompt “Is it your preference to probe inside the property or investigate the exterior encompassing the crime scene,” is wordy and users will struggle to select an option.

Personality

Emojis 😄

My Adventure Book is designed to be fun and playful. To embody these values, emojis were deployed to add color and personality. Take these intents for example:

Sound design

Another key to establishing the fun and playful personality of My Adventure Book are sound effects. Here’s a peak at a few of the custom sounds effects created specifically for MAB:

Programming logic

As stated previously, the goal of My Adventure Book is to find all three special endings. In order for the game to recognize when a user has triggered a special ending, backend logic was required. The code was implemented with Node.js and deployed to Firebase. Using a webhook, Dialogflow was enabled to make a call to the cloud function on Firebase. Finally, users can access the skill on Google Assistant through the integration with Dialogflow.

Interested in the code?

Here’s a link to the project on GitHub.

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A bit more

This project involved many other skills including script writing, context management, digital art creation, user testing, and more.

And if you would like to chat about the design process, you can find my contact info below.