Alexa Skill: Women Composers Trivia
After attending an Alexa conference and learning more about Amazon’s Skill Blueprints, I wanted to see how the process worked myself. From a UX perspective, I was interested in better understanding the challenges of creating a basic game without a visual interface.
I created a simple game for a music project that my team at work could use a content for Women’s History Month, aimed at classical fans. I chose a simple trivia game from the Blueprints specs, created ten composer questions/answers, and began creating the Skill.
Challenge Statement: Explore UX design without a visual interface by creating a basic Alexa Skill.
The Process
As part of the Skill Blueprint process, I carefully chose a short yet specific invocation or phrase for users to say in order to play the game via their Amazon device. An important tip I learned through my research into smart speaker interactions was to keep the invocation short, easy for users to remember and a phrase without words that might be misinterpreted by Alexa with regional accents and other voice considerations. I enjoyed the voice focused part of the process as that isn’t often part of developing an app, website or product that relies on visuals. Using design thinking and best practices for a voice only product was a great UX exercise!
After the trivia game was live in the Amazon Skills store, I enlisted the help of a few colleagues to help me test both the invocation, the Skill itself and the overall experience. We were able to sit together in the same room to test and make notes on changes. I immediately made updates in the Amazon Developers dashboard for any issues we discovered, such as question phrasing and sounds associated with right/wrong answers. Once I had the questions and answers I wanted, the entire creation process only took a few hours before I was able to submit it to Amazon for approval. Click here to view or enable the Women Composers Trivia Alexa Skill!
Time Frame: 1.5 weeks
Lessons Learned
While this was a fascinating process and a lot of fun to create a Skill, there were many elements I couldn’t control within the Skill Blueprint framework. For example, I had to choose from a limited user flow through the Skill, which I felt could’ve been more creative and intuitive if we had more options to design the experience. One of the biggest challenges was trying to figure out how to instruct users on moving through the game, such as going back to the previous question, starting over, etc. Voice interactions are still relatively new and many users are unsure which invocations or phrases to use. Since there are no visual features to this Skill, it drove home the importance of branding the experience with a unique voice and infusing personality into the entire Skill.
In the future, I’d like to try other Skill Blueprints to compare to the Trivia Skill Blueprint. I am also interested to see how Amazon evolves the Skill Blueprint to enable creators to better brand and control the user experience as the technology progresses.
Next Steps
I enjoyed creating a new Skill and plan on exploring other Blueprint options to build my Alexa Skills knowledge and work. While the Women Composers Trivia Skill is live, I’d like to update the Skill by:
Replacing the basic Skill icon placeholder to a more visually pleasing, branded icon created specifically for our company’s new Skill
Incorporating a voice personality, rather than using Alexa, to better brand the Skill
Adding more questions so multiple players can enjoy the game longer
Using short musical excerpts for fans to listen to enhance the game, depending on publishing/licensing
Tools
Amazon BluePrint Skills, Amazon Echo, Google Sheets