H&M Prototypes a Google Assistant Experience

VUI

What does it sound like to design a beautiful home? It took a voice UI design sprint for H&M to find out (hint: it’s like having your coolest friend guiding you to the very best stuff).
STATS
Sprint Type
VUI
Where
Google London
Teams
H&M, Bontouch
Team Size
14 Participants
No. of Days
3 Days

The Challenge

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In fashion, everybody knows H&M as a trend maker, not a follower. So as they launched H&M Home, they were looking for ways to give their customers a shopping experience that was unique for the category. They also were keen to make sure H&M Home maintained their reputation as a brand that’s always blazing a trail. Working with their digital agency, Bontouch, they decided to explore how technology could play a part.

Bontouch talked with Google about ways to integrate new technology into H&M Home and in the end, they were drawn to Google Assistant and Voice. They saw this as an opportunity to leverage conversation design in both the fashion and home space—and of course maintain their status as one of the first players to market with this technology. Because voice UI is so radically different than visual UI, when they embarked on its development, they reached out to Google to help them build new skills and help align the team on the best use cases to pursue.

Before the actual sprint, Bontouch took the additional helpful step of hosting a creative workshop with H&M group to further refine the objectives of the sprint. This workshop helped the teams get to know each other a bit better before the sprint and they decided on the use case of style inspiration.

The Team

Sprint Masters: Kai Haley & Nick Butcher
Google Experts: Marc Paulina, Peter Hodgson, Stephen Mailey, Wally Brill

The sprint took place at Google London with a broad range of participants, including the digital design and development team from Bontouch as well as several stakeholders from H&M group ranging from research & development to fashion & home design. Google sprint master Kai Haley led the sprint with valuable help from Google Assistant experts Nick Butcher, Marc Paulina and Stephen Mailey.

“There were seven or eight people who came from different areas in H&M group and who hadn’t worked together before,” says Elin Frendberg, a group business development and innovation executive at H&M group. “It was a super interesting, cross-functional team—business leaders, managers, tech leaders—and it was a really fun experience to come together and align on what we were going to do and why. Each team had different KPIs, but we were committed to using the sprint to launch something. So everybody had to give something up, and there was a lot of ‘killing your darlings’ to get there.”

The Sprint

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Because voice UI is still a fairly new area of technology, the sprint had some very specific—and very steep—learning curves for everybody involved. Here’s why: The way users interact with voice UI is radically different from how they interact with graphical ones, so their expectations of the experience are different as well. Voice UI is more like you’re talking with a real person versus the mediated relationship with a graphical interface.

In order to create a great user experience with voice, the sprint included lightning talks on the principles of conversation design. Following Google's newly developed VUI Design Sprint model, which relies heavily on role playing to prototype dialogue, the whole team got an instant education in how people use speech to work collaboratively to achieve a goal.

But first they had to determine what H&M’s own brand persona was when it came to voice. “The activity of defining brand persona isn’t typical in a sprint,” says Sprint Master Kai Haley. “But when it comes to voice, it’s very personal. That voice and tone is very connected to the brand. So we had to create an H&M Home brand persona using a conversation with a flow as the prototype. Instead of the visual mocks typically done in a design sprint, you have to do role playing with your teams so you can get a better sense of how that flow is working. Does this feel like a real conversation? And what are the components that make a conversation feel like it’s real?”

To get to that sense of realness, the teams had to come together and do improvised role playing, a fairly time-intensive process that again isn’t typically found in a design sprint, and something that definitely needs to be factored into the sprint timeline if it’s going to be done right.

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Most team members on sprints don’t have improv or role playing experience, and this can be a bit uncomfortable. But without it, a customer’s experience with H&M Home’s voice UI could feel robotic, or worse, unhelpful. So during the sprint, the team worked together to create a loose and comfortable environment for creativity and collaboration. (In other words, the sprint masters made it okay for people to be silly.) Even though it may seem off the sprint grid, using improv exercises and other “tools” borrowed from theater and comedy is crucial to warm up the members of the team. “All of these people are used to sitting at a big table staring at their laptops,” says Haley. “The idea of standing up and jumping around and pretending to be your user or a personification of your brand can be really uncomfortable. But it’s completely essential. If you go straight to dialogue flow without this process, it will never sound natural.”

It was definitely a unique experience for the H&M group and Bontouch teams. “We have personas for other areas of our business, but we hadn’t thought much at all about what H&M Home sounds like,” says Frendberg. “Doing this part of the sprint was hard, but we came away with a lot of new insights. We recorded a lot of dialogues and listened closely, iterating and fine tuning all along the way until we agreed on the H&M Home brand persona for voice: it’s different, it’s human and it has a real personality, like somebody who’s a cool friend guiding you.”

Michael Rotstein, design director of Bontouch agrees. “Since in voice, there is no visual way to communicate brand values and identity, it has to come through the personality of the voice assistant,” he says. “So through the sprint, we realized how much thought and effort we needed to put into the actual dialogue. You can’t just write the script. You have to say it out loud. You have to role play.”

And like in any sprint, they tested with users. Only this time instead of clicking on buttons, testers used their voices to make sure that the team was creating dialogue that felt real. In H&M Home’s case, it’s what help them align on the decision that the customer would be having a dialogue with a stylist—a “person” they call the H&M Home stylist—instead of, for example, an item itself.

The Discovery

When there’s a mature product and a tight, well-aligned team in terms of value prop and audience, you don’t always need a sprint to get you where you need to go. But this sprint turned out to be the perfect thing for H&M Home and Bontouch. Everyone’s used to reviewing and prototyping visuals, but the voice experience is new for everyone—the users, the product team, the development team, marketing. Voice transforms a normally static interaction into something very human.

The sprint also helped the teams realize how much complexity is added to the mix with voice. On a graphic interface, you can clearly direct users to what their options are. But in voice, a user has to lead the experience by saying something for the VUI to respond to and it can create confusion for the user if they’re not sure what they need or where they want to go. There’s also the chance that the dialogue can go so broad that there’s no way for the interface to handle all of the scenarios. That’s why it’s imperative that the team needs to be ready to provide more guidance as to how to get down the path than is typically necessary with visual content, as well as have the discipline to constrain the scenarios to a sequence that’s technically feasible to accommodate.

Taking these challenges on head first, the Bontouch and H&M Home teams worked quickly to bring the prototype to market on a short deadline—just two months after the sprint. Taking these challenges on head first, the H&M and Bontouch teams worked quickly to bring the prototype to market on a short deadline–just two months after the sprint. The close collaboration continued throughout the project where all aspects of the technology, content and user experience had to be ironed out in parallel. Within a month, they were ready to test their updated version of the prototype with users again, and they used the feedback they gathered to further refine a believable and effective dialog in the live version of the app. Within a month, they were ready to test their updated version of the prototype with users again, and they used the feedback they gathered to further refine a believable and effective dialog in the live version of the app.

Rotstein credits the sprint with getting them to market with the app so quickly. “The sprint gave us the confidence to quickly start the production phase and to aim for a June launch, right at the time when Google Assistant was scheduled to be released in Sweden,” he says.

After the sprint, we had a brand persona, a concept we saw potential in and initial user testing to back it up.

Frendberg agrees. “We were able to have such speed in getting the app to market because we had done so much in the sprint,” she says. “It was really an eye opener for us, and because what we created in the sprint was so much more than we expected, we now have a great product and we are very happy.”

Try it out for yourself by saying "Ok Google can I talk to H&M Home"

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The Outcome

Sprint Outcome