[ music ]
build on Josh's story earlier it was that they made the walkway between when
they deplaned people and where they picked up their bags they made that
longer so that people were taking their time they had to get there by the time
they got there their bags were already there
same thing with like elevators if the elevators are mirrored people don't
complain about having to wait as much
and just sit and look at myself anyway design tricks okay so in 1966 at a
dinner party in New York City Lloyd Morris said this guy who was a
president of the Marco foundation found himself in a conversation with a woman
named Joan Ganz Cooney she was a producer at wnet which is a I think it's
wnat New York's channel 13 public broadcasting station and they started
pondering this question because Lloyd was telling this story about how his two
young daughters seemed to be able to remember the jingles from commercials on
Saturday morning cartoons easier than they could remember the things that they
were learning in kindergarten first grade etc so he thought I wonder if we
could use music to help teach kids and she said huh you know what that's
interesting also kids seem to really be paying attention to this new screen that
is becoming ubiquitous in homes that is television starting to show up in more
and more homes and they wondered together whether they could master the
addictive qualities of television and potentially with music too and do
something good with them and from that dinner party they went out and raised
some money they have more conversations they brought different kinds of people
together into a room and they started thinking about what this could be
now the climate at the time was really important too because there was this guy
named Newton Minow he was the chairman of the F
see and you can look it up he made this public speech called the vast wasteland
speech that's what it ended up being called where he said television is a
vast wasteland it is all formulaic the commercials are constantly cajoling off
oftentime kids to buy things all of the programming follows the same formula the
cartoons are full of violence this thing needs some help all right we are not
getting what we need to get out of this really powerful new technology and
medium so Lloyd and Joan brought together a whole bunch of people and
they started putting together some tests little tiny micro chunks of content that
they designed together with school psychologists and curriculum designers
with child therapists who had worked with kids in abusive homes they worked
with musicians and started to create what they hoped might be the kind of
material that could be displayed on television to teach kids they put kids
and kids in the urban environments that they were really targeting to try to get
those urban kids learning at the same level and competitive with their
suburban more affluent counterparts put him in front of TVs and they watched and
they changed little bits and pieces of the content over and over again to
really figure out whether or not the kids were learning each of these pieces
of content had some defined measure of success like the kid would start
counting or the kid would start saying the next letter in the alphabet and they
kept going back and forth like this tape changing little tiny elements of every
piece of content and this is really one of the things that I want to talk about
today is that as they were testing these little bits and pieces they started to
learn that the kids were more likely to trust the content and learn from the
content if the content felt more like the kind of environment that the kids
were used to are it so it wasn't just about teaching
curriculum but it was about using the little elements of a kids daily life and
some of the things they might be afraid of and some of the things that represent
their peers and some of the things that represent Authority in the content
itself so what do you think this program is it was actually written at some point
in the program here and I was like oh shit you gave him away the punchline I
shouldn't have given you the name of it but yes it's Sesame Street okay
Gold Star Sesame Street so this is how Sesame Street started with like two
million bucks in 1969 and November it aired on Public Broadcasting no
advertising no major networks and it is a global brand today and the way the set
was even designed was to reflect the context in which these kids were
generally experiencing their lives so things like the stoop had dirt on it
because that's what the kid that couldn't be a shiny set that's why the
characters all had a little bit of stuff on him because that was how the kids
were experiencing the kids that they were trying to target we're experiencing
their lives day to day that's why Grouch lives it Oscar the
Grouch lives in a trash can because trash cans were part of their lives
along the street day to day and those curriculum designers by the way why
puppets are part of this is because those child therapists said that kids
from abused homes are more likely to respond to a sock with eyeballs on it
attached to a human then to the human who's actually talking to the child that
is the kind of audience that is already even at these young preschool age are
already different kinds of emotional audience members then we might not
really think we're trying to design for them and so what ended up happening is
that Sesame Street had to find the right mix of the puppets which represented the
child's consciousness and the humans which represented authority to figure
out when timing-wise and for which kinds of
segments to have each on each on TV so that the kids could learn so what I'm
going to show you now is another example of some early testing that they did this
is a very young James Earl Jones counting to ten ready one
two
three
four
five
six seven
eight
nine
10 in the background you might have noticed there were cars honking did you
notice that that's the kind of stuff that this team was doing they were also
testing the amount of time between numbers they found that for seconds the
kids would lose attention to seconds wasn't long enough for them to start
learning when he waited 3 seconds in between each number in the sequence the
kids would start saying the next number in the sequence out loud and that's how
Sesame Street developed all of its content taking these micro chunks with
small use cases that could be tested and so they started with two main goals get
kids counting to 10 and get them knowing their ABCs that's our system each Street
started only after they had developed the process of taking these tiny goals
working with the content working with the context in which kids were
experiencing their lives and embedding that into the design of the program
itself do they start scaling it to new populations like The Electric Company
trying to do that same formula with an older population 7 to 9 year olds then
as things started to move into the 90s and 2000's how did they start taking
that material and start adapting into gaming technologies into new physical
and digital games it interacted this is an AR VR game they also started moving
into different kinds of content in the programming after they found that the
mr. Hooper episode episode which is mr. Hooper was a cast member who died in
real life of old age and mr. Hooper still to this day that episode where
they confronted death on Sesame Street and they talked about death it's still
the most popular episode ever but they didn't start there they started with
numbers and letters and then they moved into things like divorce and to natural
disasters talking about rebuilding cities after Hurricane Katrina and just
last year they've released an autistic character they grew they grew from these
roots from these small roots and as you heard from Josh earlier around things
when we get into these new technology it's setting these expectations and
using the existing conditions in fact in the case of AI the disillusionment we
might feel by having something like Siri ask ask me say ask me anything and then
asking her something that she can't answer and that giant gap being really
disappointing we have an opportunity to kind of set the expectations early on
and be able to grow as the technology grows as it becomes more ubiquitous in
people's lives just like Sesame Street did as one example and that's especially
powerful if we can embrace the emotion of the end user of the person on the
other side and consider the context of their everyday lives be able to use that
emotion as a design material because if we can do that we can establish the
trust the trust it's absolutely essential this trust that kids needed to
have in order to be able to believe the material that was coming through the
television and then be able to drive behavioural change so the kids could
actually learn and then the roots of learning get deeper that trust is
foundational to driving behavioral change and emotion is so so powerful
it's such a powerful piece of the designers toolkit that's something that
we started with when we being Capital One and a conversational ai design team
that I lead set out to design what now is known as Eno this is Capital One's
gender-neutral intelligent assistant the only gender-neutral intelligent
assistant at any US bank by the way you know is one spelled backwards nobody
likes that just me okay thank you yeah all right
anyway we started out again with a very small use case of giving people their
balance and enabling them to pay their bill over SMS two years ago when we set
out it was eight weeks from and 28 people to create a prototype of what Eno
could be SMS is the most ubiquitous channel anybody with a mobile phone is
able to text so any of our customers would be able to use Eno that's how
we started with can I get my balance and I need to pay my bill that was it it
grew from there along with those functional use cases we
also developed a whole bunch of jokes which tend to be money puns okay but we
started to build in some of the humanity around Eno and also created several
different ways of saying I'm sorry like error messages hey I'm sorry I can't
understand that quite yet but the more you talk to me the more I learn so
you've just made me a little bit smarter some of that kind of stuff to try to
bridge the gap between what Eno was able to do at launch and what you know and
what customers might be expecting you know to be able to do because we started
an SMS and then we grew from there we moved into our web and mobile
application we started learning how customers wanted to talk about money
differently depending upon the modality so this is an example of the message
that we have available to customers when they are looking at Eno in the
mobile application and you can see here it says I'm new so I typically respond
best to short requests that was language we added because when people moved into
I'm sorry the web application when people moved into the desktop
application they started giving us their life story cuz they could like type oh
I'm going traveling on this it's going to be so great Annina was like I don't
know how to do this I have been used to thumb typing right so Eno was
optimized for quick responses thumbs up emojis that sort of thing and then as we
moved into new channel Eno is having a harder
understanding so we had to set the expectation hey can you please give me
sure to request and like here's a few examples of shorter requests that I'm
really good at answering to try to bridge that gap one of the things that's
true about AI is similar to TV in the 60s is that we have to bunt balance that
functional and the emotional side of the work that we're doing there are two
sides of conversational AI the task completion or productivity side and the
emotional side you need both to truly realize its promise of AI and that's
what the CVP of AI and Research Harry Shum said it at Microsoft this other
quote I think grabs it too these conversations evoke emotion and lead to
relationships or didn't trust empathy and understanding they create an
experience it has customers paying attention with their hearts and their
minds and okay this is the director of conversational AI at my team okay that's
what she said so I'm being really biased about this but this is the heart of what
any I think great design work and again I'm biased but I believe that this is
the heart of what it's any great design work it's a diversity of thinking just
like Sesame Street did bringing multidisciplinary kinds of folks around
the table people who normally wouldn't be in a room together to confront
something that has a clear vision about that and for hours it is how do we help
people be better with their money so the thing is money is the functional side in
case of Capital One money is transactional right so we might start
designing for use cases that look like this our customers asking when is my
bill due or they might type bow things that are very transactional in nature I
need to move money I want to credit eliminates those are kinds of things so
we designed for that but the truth of course is that people are emotional
they're not transactional businesses are transactional technologies transactional
people are emotional and that's the opportunity so people would tell us
those same transactional kinds of statements in this way I'm afraid to ask
my balance why don't I ever have enough money you know I just got a fraud alert
and I'm scared somebody stole my identity
I'm overseas I'm locked out of my account I can't pay sadface you know
what's the meaning of life can I get an extension I get paid Friday I swear I'll
pay you back I just got paid ha ha these are actual verbatim from our customers
right now to illustrate the color of life how people are moving through their
life and how money is an enabler in some case a disabler if we're not able to
meet them and understand them and hear the stories and be able to infer them
from the stories what they need and actually assist them because that's the
promise of AI is to actually be an assistant as Jimmy said to actually know
what you don't know but be pretty sure that it would be helpful if we took care
of it for you and give you the control to fix it later that's the kind of just
a little pressure release it's gonna help you get through your day a little
more that's the promise of this as we start thinking about how Ino can be more
emotional we start adding animation we start bringing more of the character to
life even though Eno is gender neutral we chose that because we want to
manifest the values of our company in a way so that people could imagine
whatever they wanted to imagine this relationship with the assistant that we
wouldn't be prescriptive about that so it's really heartening as a designer to
see these kinds of feedback loops these are measures of success the number of
ways that people say thank you the number of ways that people say I love
you even people who say I love you bro and you know that they're forming this
relationship that you left open to their imagination that they're starting to
trust this thing and it shows up in the ratings when we get it right when we're
balancing these two parts of every great design interaction so I'll leave you
with a little anecdote one of the things that Eno does is sends out a
notification in a few different use cases that as Josh was talking about
we're looking across patterns your spending patterns
other people's spending patterns and we're going huh that's weird it looks
like you were just double charged the exact same amount at the same vendor
that might have been a mistake or your subscription just went up or the tip
that you normally leave at a restaurant was not the tip that you just left at
that restaurant you just left a huge tip so we're just gonna send out a quick
note Eno is gonna say hey did you mean to do this is this really what you
meant to do and so we did that for this person is a buddy of mine and he was he
was in a different City he was going to board meetings and his wife who's an
authorized user of his credit card was in the same town with him and she had
traveled with him and she was out shopping so he got an alert from ìno and
just making sure that this is in fact spending that's correct on your account
and you know about it so we may have to turn the volume up evil a little bit
more for this one it's a little there's some background noise but just like
really focus on this person's voice what's your name boys Marissa Lloyd how
did you feel when your wife bought all those things while you were in the board
meetings and then you got an email asking you to approve the transaction
well I was really glad to get the email I know that Capital One was on the ball
checking fun I had no problems at home and they did with press one button and
said outside you're recognized oh good it made me feel pretty good I thought
that we were safe thank you also do you think sempai is like the coolest person
ever
again like that's the kind of feedback loop I felt safe Capital One was on the
ball those are the kinds of things that it is a not designer and especially in a
space like this where things are always moving in all the times and with a I
machine learning we can pay attention to those things and if we just design to
help people on the other side take into consideration their emotional state in
this case that it might have actually been fraudulent activity what do we need
to do in that moment to help somebody feel a little bit better about the
situation right now those are the kinds of things that make me feel really good
as a designer by the way does anybody recognize that person all right let me
take it back a little bit as this help does this help
yeah that's right so that's Lloyd Morissette the co-creator of Sesame
Street who is a Capital One customer and Lloyd the Jimmy's point about having
diversity as part of your circle Lloyd is somebody you might think well he's a
co-creator Sesame Street he probably doesn't have to worry about money but
Lloyd worries about money and in fact he gave us a new acronym that we didn't
know called room running out of money which is something that he and his peers
the community where he lives talked about and that's the kind of
thing that again emotional state who are we designing for and what are the kinds
of patterns that we can use to help create better experiences those are the
kinds of things that are our design material so if we embrace it we embrace
that emotional or design for AI but designing in general we're going to
really better be in a better position to establish trust which is really what
behavioral change is all about for both sides for both the end user and for the
designer - thank you
yeah so I think when we think about that emotional connection we often think
especially harkening back to Sesame Street
think about character oh yeah and we've all had that moment with conversational
interfaces where where these machines that are trying to have human character
yeah yeah and so how do you think about striking that balance between like
letting machines be machines and and letting them feel like computational
mm-hmm versus trying to imbue them with something that feels human right may
fall short oh yeah yeah I'm I'm a big fan of being explicit whether it's in
the design of design itself or just straight up hey I am like you know for
example we'll say I'm available 24/7 because unlike a human I don't have to
sleep and think that's the way that Eno is able to convey I'm not a human but
doesn't start the conversation like that because we're like in some way you know
I don't know a self conscious that you might think it's a human like the
natural reaction especially when you're interacting with your bank is that you
are in fact in a 24/7 chat kind of environment interacting with a human on
the other side so I think in the design itself there are ways that we can
manifest that it's not a human and we should for transparency and Trust with
the end customer without saying I'm not a human but just setting up the
expectation that this is a brave new world that we live in and the thing that
I'm always a little we talk about it a lot in the work that we're doing but I'm
I'm always a little torn on is the attempting to represent oneself as a
human and when I think about like Alexa and Siri are not necessarily doing that
right but with the gendered voice and being able to look like the troubling
thing is watching how people respond to that I have fears around
representing gender and humanity kinds of assistance when interactions are
definitely going to fail so I'll use in a specific example just so it's not so
generic which is kids like kids who yell at their Alexa Alexa shut up you know
and like as a parent I mean we've done a lot of research and the parents like
don't talk to Alexa but why wouldn't you talk to Alexa cos Alexa doesn't have
feelings but then it's setting up this weird behavioral pattern where like I'm
allowed to yell at in this case a woman who is not a representative of a woman
who is not satisfying my needs and it starts to raise some real interesting
social ethical questions that I think the more we can move into transparency
on what this thing is and get into more gender neutrality or intersectionality
of having the kinds of behavioral patterns reinforced in real life is
we're interfacing with them the better so that's like a roundabout way but the
bottom line is being upfront about not being human because as we start to move
into humanity or being human the disconnect between being able to deliver
that and where we're at right now is just too great and I fear I fear for
what we're actually imbuing yeah yeah very much and I mean if you found any
like her coming back to Jimmy's talk about like have you found any
differences in terms of how different populations or people in different kind
of cultural contexts respond to Eno have you broken down any kind of
research in that way yeah so great question one of the things that we were
really surprised about where how many people in what we would get like in the
above 55 category are using our we're using Eno over SMS and the most
interesting thing about that was when we were doing research with with customers
they felt proud of being able to interact with their bank on SMS because
they tended to have learned how the text from their kids or their
grandkids so there was this like look I can do this thing and then they can go
back and talk to their kids and grandkids about how they're doing that
and they're like it was this emotional connection to the channel and the
interaction itself but one of the other like I would say demographic differences
is being able to use voice to text which is what we do has been able to make
especially unbanked populations or in more remote areas be able to access
their banking and that wouldn't necessarily be the case if we started in
voice where we would have a harder time ostensibly with the technology so what
it is understanding inflection or differences in tonality and that sort of
thing that come from like onion LexA you know it's just a device sitting on your
on your kitchen counter for the most part anyway so staying in plain text
trying to stay in plain text also makes it most accessible to two folks and also
for translation which we have not gotten into Capital One is largely in the
United States and also Canada in which case we actually have one of our
designers here from Canada here anyway and the UK but really an English
population is still our largest population base but translation services
would be easier in plain text as well so great anyway thank you so much so yeah