Margaret H. Szymanski - Böcker

In the 1970s, Xerox pioneered the involvement of social science researchers in technology design and in developing better ways of working. The Xerox legacy is a hybrid methodology that combines an ethnographic interest in direct observation in settings of interest with an ethnomethodological concern to make the study of interactional work an empirical, investigatory matter. This edited volume is an overview of Xerox's social science tradition. It uses detailed case studies showing how the client engagement was conducted over time and how the findings were consequential for business impact. Case studies in retail, production, office and home settings cover four topics: practices around documents, the customer front, learning and knowledge-sharing, and competency transfer. The impetus for this book was a 2003 Xerox initiative to transfer knowledge about conducting ethnographically grounded work practice studies to its consultants so that they may generate the kinds of knowledge generated by the researchers themselves.

In the 1970s, Xerox pioneered the involvement of social science researchers in technology design and in developing better ways of working. The Xerox legacy is a hybrid methodology that combines an ethnographic interest in direct observation in settings of interest with an ethnomethodological concern to make the study of interactional work an empirical, investigatory matter. This edited volume is an overview of Xerox's social science tradition. It uses detailed case studies showing how the client engagement was conducted over time and how the findings were consequential for business impact. Case studies in retail, production, office and home settings cover four topics: practices around documents, the customer front, learning and knowledge-sharing, and competency transfer. The impetus for this book was a 2003 Xerox initiative to transfer knowledge about conducting ethnographically grounded work practice studies to its consultants so that they may generate the kinds of knowledge generated by the researchers themselves.

As voice interfaces and virtual assistants have moved out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops and living rooms of the general public, a demand for a new kind of user experience (UX) design is emerging. Although the people are becoming familiar with Siri, Alexa, Cortana and others, their user experience is still characterized by short, command- or query-oriented exchanges, rather than longer, conversational ones. Limitations of the microphone and natural language processing technologies are only part of the problem. Current conventions of UX design apply mostly to visual user interfaces, such as web or mobile; they are less useful for deciding how to organize utterances, by the user and the virtual agent, into sequences that work like those of natural human conversation. This edited book explores the intersection of UX design, of both text- or voice-based virtual agents, and the analysis of naturally occurring human conversation (e.g., the Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics literatures). It contains contributions from researchers, from academia and industry, with varied backgrounds working in the area of human-computer interaction. Each chapter explores some aspect of conversational UX design. Some describe the design challenges faced in creating a particular virtual agent. Others discuss how the findings from the literatures of the social sciences can inform a new kind of UX design that starts with conversation.