Transcript of Interview With Susan Hura

Interview With Susan Hura

This interview features Susan Hura, chief design officer at Kore.ai. You can watch it on Susan’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello again. I’m Joe Welinske, Conference Director of Convey UX. We’re going into our 12th annual conference, which will be coming up at the last week of February in Seattle and also online. And this is one of the opportunities that I get to speak with the presenters that will be at the conference. And today I am pleased to be speaking with Susan Hura. Hello, Susan. How are you today?

– Hey, Joe. I’m doing great. I’m getting really excited with the conference coming up.

– Well, I’m sitting at my home office on a really dreary wet day, which is just north of Blink’s headquarters in Seattle. Where are you talking to us from?

– I am talking to you from similarly gray and wet Cleveland, Ohio.

– All right, well, we have that in common. Well, we’re really happy to have you participating in this event. I’ve chatted with you before as someone with an organization that Blink and Emphasis work with. But maybe you could start by talking a little bit about your background and the type of work that you do.

– Sure, sure. So I’m Susan Hura. I am Chief Design Officer at Kore.ai. I’m actually a linguist by training. Unlike a lot of my peers, I actually got into linguistics because I was interested in the technology applications of language. So a lot of my background is in speech acoustics and speech perception. So how people’s ears and brains work together to decode audio and understand what someone is saying to us. And yeah, I’ve been lucky enough to work with speech and language technologies my whole career, starting out in academia and for many years having my own consultancy, but Kore convinced me not quite two years ago to, to join the ranks there. And I’ve been really super happy to learn and contribute to Kore’s conversational AI platform. Yeah. And so it’s the role of my little team to help our customers and our partners figure out how to deliver amazing UXs with the technology that Kore provides.

– Well, I’m sure you have more than enough things to keep you busy every day, but are there any particular challenges going on right now that are something that you’re facing individually, or your organization, or maybe more broadly about the industry?

– Well, you know, unless you’ve been living in a cave in the woods, disconnected for the past year, you might have heard of a little thing called ChatGPT, and so that offering from OpenAI and offerings from a bunch of other organizations that are building and putting out there for public use, large language models, this has turned conversational design on its head. Things that used to be a day-to-day part, a thing that you needed to learn, ways that you needed to hone your craft and grow skills and be able to do manually yourself, you can now have a large language model handle it. And so this has been a year of upheaval, of churn, which means it’s simultaneously super exciting. There’s a ton of opportunities and it’s also somewhat terrifying, if you look at it too closely. But, yeah, it’s actually what led me to the topic that I wanted to talk about today, was just this crazy whirlwind of change that my industry is in right now.

– Well, let me just announce your topic, building expertise into generated conversations. And so having picked that, why do you think that is important for our audience to understand a little bit more about?

– Yeah, yeah. Thank you for, for asking that, because listen, conversational UX is going to become more and more and more present in user experiences in general. Okay. When I started in this business, the only kind of conversations that we could enable were over the phone, which was quite separate from the rest of user experience, but now conversational experiences, they live on all of these different platforms that are part of the broader user experience. So broadly speaking, that’s why it’s important, but the specifics here of why do I wanna talk about building expertise into these conversations? It’s basically because even though we have technology now that can manage large chunks of dialogue for us and can do it in a way that is completely flexible, completely non-linear, it can be very much user initiated dialogues, right? You don’t have to follow a set pattern, but in spite of that, we don’t want to abandon the whole body of knowledge that conversation designers have built up over the last 30 years or so, right. There’s an awful lot that we have learned about what makes for a good conversational experience. And my talk focuses on how do we inject that knowledge in as we try to make use of the new technologies.

– Well, I think it’s gonna be a wonderful session and illuminating for our audience at the conference. So our event has people from a wide range of experiences. We have a lot of senior practitioners, but we also have people that are relatively new to the profession at the event. For people that are kind of just getting started in the user experience area or maybe those that are just starting to learn about AI, do you have a tip or a thought that might be helpful?

– Yeah, and I’m gonna return to something I actually said briefly before, which is conversation is coming to your interface, right? Whether you believe it or not, right now, I happen to be married to a UXer, and for many, many years, the work that I did in conversation and the work that he did in traditional graphical based, user experience design and research, we were completely separate. Every single project he has worked on in the past many years has involved conversation design in one way or another, right? Not because he went went and sought those out, but that’s just because that’s the way the world is moving. So my best tip either for people just coming into user experience or for folks who are seasoned, who wanna be prepared for what they’re gonna see down the line is educate yourselves on conversation. I see conversation design as a species of user experience design, right? So the philosophies, the user-centric perspective, all of those things remain the same, but there’s lots of specifics about conversation that are just different than what you would be used to if you’re designing for visual media. Okay. And I actually have a book recommendation that I think is like a really easy jumping endpoint for anybody. It’s a book called “Conversations With Things,” and it came out a few years ago, written by Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Diebel. It’s well written. It’s an easy way to jump in and learn a little bit about conversation and about how to design effective conversations.

– Well, I appreciate you providing that book reference as well, because in fact we always have a bookstore or one of our local Seattle bookstores kind enough to offer books on sale at the events. So that was one of the things I was gonna ask you about. So thanks very much for that tip. Well, Susan, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today about your background and the session, your ideas about AI, and I look forward to seeing you in Seattle in a couple of months.

– Sounds great, Joe. I’ll see you then.

– Thanks a lot. Bye.

– Bye.