Project Summary:

I designed this skill as part of a Voice User Interface Design course, and the code I used was for a generic Animal Personality quiz. Since 2022 is the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Camille Saint-Saens' The Carnival of the Animals, I thought it would be perfect to use animals from the movements of this piece. I have played repertoire from The Carnival of the Animals as a musician, so I immediately thought of utilizing it for the animal personality quiz. I searched through animal quizzes and other personality quizzes both in the Alexa skill store and online.  I was surprised there were no personality quizzes based on this iconic piece.

​

Methods and Tools:​

• Sample Dialogs

• User Flow

• Miro

• Canva 

• Usability Testing

• Node.js

 

Challenge:

The main challenge for this project was to find a balance between enhancing the voice experience with skill cards without distracting from it. I focused on bringing more personality into the voice experience through the use of fun musical puns and phrases to make the voice fully engaging without the visual elements. Some of the other challenges I encountered were:

•  Making sure the skill cards were not repetitious while maintaining a cohesive design.

• Creating a variety of responses to avoid repetition with each question and response.

• Encourage users to interact with the experience more than once.

• Considering all ages while designing the questions and responses since the classical theme is respected by adults even though The Carnival of the Animals is a piece written for children.

• Carefully scoring the results so that they made sense with the chosen responses.

​

Research and Findings:

, I immediately thought of The Carnival of the Animals as a good theme for an animal personality quiz since I am very familiar with the piece through my musical background. I also took advantage of my musical background to create a word bank of musical terms such as, "bravo, encore, double bar, and improvise." This word bank helped inform my Sample Dialogs and Voice Script. I wanted the visual design to reference the musical score as well, so I used images of the sheet music in the background for the animal results. I think this added educational value since I chose the score for the instruments that solo in each movement.

​

Usability Testing:

User tests were conducted remotely with Zoom. The system prompts and responses were played using the VoiceX Prototyping tool. There were 10 participants ranging in age from 9-72 to determine if it was accessible for a wide audience age range.

​

Test Objectives:

• Identify any sticking points in the user flow.

• Determine if the prompts are clear and help users to navigate easily.

• Compare scoring and validity of results.

• Gain feedback on visual design.

• Evaluate accessibility for a wide age range.

​

Test Results:

• All ages of users enjoyed the humorous, musical puns and weren't confused by them.

• The quiz results were varied and users felt they were accurate to their responses

• The visual design was universally enjoyed and not found to be distracting from the voice experience.

​

Outcomes and What's Next:

I submitted The Carnival of the Animals Personality Quiz through the Alexa Developer Console, and it was quickly approved. In the future, I would like to add more keywords to increase traffic, since I didn't take full advantage of that during the certification process. I would also like to add audio clips from the each of the movements of The Carnival of the Animals to further add educational value to the skill.