Multimodal Design Has Become More Important Than Ever Before

Connectivity between a mobile and a smart speaker.

I’ve always been and still am a strong believer in how Voice User Interfaces will significantly impact most user experiences. What I couldn’t predict, of course, was the emergence of the Covid Pandemic and how it would change the way we would live and work.

The Impact of Covid — Hygienic Awareness

Covid has raised awareness in terms of hygiene. Not only personal hygiene, but also touching public screens, giving handshakes, using an elevator, and so on. We are used to pressing buttons, using remote controls, and so on. Yet, Covid has made us aware that public products and services might not be very safe. Although that fear has diminished greatly, going to the gym, for example, is simply not the same anymore.

Let’s take the remote control as an example. In general, it’s used by multiple people and is not the most hygienic device you can find in a household. This is merely one of the many examples that create the opportunity to revisit remote controls and potentially implement a voice module to control your Smart TV, A/C, Fan, or radio.

Smart TVs are still controlled by devices.

Touchless Technologies — Not Just Voice and Visuals

Most car parking ticket machines rely on touchscreens, something that could become much easier, for example by scanning a card. No need to touch anything, just use a card that is linked to your car or your phone.

As for the payment, simply make a contactless payment, and done. A technology that we’ve been using for years.

Contactless payments have been around for over a decade.

Improving The Experience with Voice — Efficiency and Simplicity

Efficiency and simplicity do form the core of multimodal systems. Every app, product, and service uses different patterns and through simple speech, you can skip patterns, and just tell the system what has to be done. Like talking to a staff member. The advantage speech has over touchless technologies that phones and cards use, is that, in the case of user that are capable of talking, they can use it anywhere. They can use it in the shower, without having to use a phone or card or wave over touchless buttons. Or, a combination, which brings us back to multimodal design.

In Summary — Expect User Experiences To Evolve Rapidly Over The Next Years

• Speech works great in that it allows the user to skip steps by just using one sentence. For example, “warm up the oven to 180 degrees” allows the user to skip pressing multiple buttons and configuring the oven.
• Touchless buttons are useful as well and will take up a prominent place in the design process of future user experiences. Just using hand gestures, without the need for a phone or card. Although these might be necessary in certain cases.

Touchless buttons and gestures are especially helpful in public spaces.

• Technologies we don’t expect to impact our lives. I wrote an article about the advantages of body odor. Every person has a unique odor and this can be used to identify health for example, but could simply be used to unlock your door for example. The reason why I’m bringing up this example is that, although many don’t believe body odor will play a role in an experience, you might be surprised, and companies are already launching products based on this technology.

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