Project Summary:

Bubble Tea Haiku is an Alexa haiku skill that reads fun and refreshing poems about popular bubble tea drink orders. I designed it for the first project in a Voice User Interface Design course. The project required that I compose at least ten original haiku poems on a subject of my choice. 

 

Methods and Tools:

• Skill diagramming

• Usability testing

• Sample utterances

• Alexa simulator

• Canva

• Node.js 

 

Research and Findings:​

There are currently 132 Haiku reader skills in the Alexa Skills Store, so I needed an idea that would stand out.  I noticed that the skills with the most reviews were humorous, and often had a specific theme instead of having just random haikus. Since I love bubble tea and reading content about "what your bubble tea order says about you," I decided that would be a unique and entertaining theme. 

​

Usability Testing: 

I conducted testing with a participant in a noisy environment over Zoom with a shared screen and the Alexa Simulator. The goals for testing were to:

• check that all the utterances worked when spoken

• hear all the responses

• understand poems when read back by Alexa.           

 

Results:

The first two tries running the code failed, but I followed the steps for troubleshooting. I discovered that I was missing a comma, and I needed to remove a comma at the end. There were no issues with the code after correcting those errors.

 

Four utterances failed, so I removed them and added sixty additional utterances. There was only one issue with Alexa misunderstanding the participant's second request which was probably due to background noise. The rest of the test went smoothly.