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

1. The Habits of Highly Effective Speech Development Teams: What You Don’t Know May Be Hurting Your Projects Melanie D. Polkosky, Ph.D., CCC-SLP Social/Cognitive Psychologist

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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 member’s status • Team members may deliberately repeat shared information to gain status (Wittenbaum & Bowman, 2005)

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. What should I do to improve my team’s 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

9. What should I do to improve my team’s 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)