The Conspiracy Theory — JESSI WILLEY | UX + Conversation Designer

“Welcome to The Conspiracy Theory. It’s up to you to discover where the cover up ends and the conspiracy begins.”

Solve your way out of a world designed from conspiracy and illusion in our audio based escape room.

Alexa, open The Conspiracy Theory

Our Team

Amy Dolin Oliver | Project Manager + Conversation Design + Product Design

Jessi Willey | Story Development + Visual Design Lead + Branding + Product Design

Danno Tabing | Information Architecture + Conversation Design + Marketing

Vicente Gerardo Guzmán Lucio | Software Development + Alexa Skills Developer

Ethel Gonzalez | Software Development + Alexa Skills Developer

Timeline | 2 weeks

Development & Design Tools

Alexa Conversations (Beta)

Alexa Presentation Language (APL)

Alexa Presentation Language for Audio (APLA)

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML)

Alexa Emotions

Audio assets: Original theme music was designed using Amper Music's artificial intelligence composer.

Open sourced audio: Alexa Skills Kit Sound Library, NASA and other open banks.

Product management and communication: Trello and Slack

Dialogue scripting: Google Sheets, inspired by Hillary Black's script template

Flow design: Miro

Visual design: Figma

Video creation and editing: Filmora 9

Kanban & Agile Methodology

Voice Interaction Gaming

The next era is here. Touchless interaction design is an opportunity to transfer navigation from hand to voice. The option to include this technology has a significant impact on communities in need of accessible alternatives.

Our current world environment has changed the way we look at and explore our world. Leaning into Voice Interaction capabilities, this project explores community and imagination to connect in our new landscape.

Conversation Design

To design an interaction solely based on conversational commands, you not only need a storyline or goal but dialogue that engages us along a humanized path. It would help if you explored the human psyche based on direct and deviant routes that one will take to get there. Voice interaction, designed with a person’s unique logic, utilizes natural language and humanized conversation to achieve their goal. In this case, it’s a game based on solving a puzzle to move on.

Here we explore the layers of the experience from dialogue to problem-solving and intuitional discovery. We are weaving in the architecture of an environment and space where the conversation takes place. Much like creating a play, we also explore movement and motivational action in a setting to shape the script and interact with the user.

Visual Design & Branding

We initially started the project in the mindset that we were submitting our work for a hackathon. It became clear after our first two days of development, that not only is this a concept, but at the end of the project we would be published with Amazon as a real product that anyone could enjoy.

We shifted our goals and pivoted with the understanding that we were developing a product. Every new product needs a pitch! We have developed a plan to create a marketing video to accompany The Conspiracy Theory and launch at the end of September 2020.

Conversation Design

We started with scripting with layers of dialogue, commands, and audio. Our next layer incorporates deviant pathway responses to deepen the level of voice integration with Alexa. Our script was co-created in excel and utilizes flow charts with information architecture. This process was agile and developed to embrace changes as we have worked out blocks and script commands that need to change as we posture for development.

Conversation worksheet created by Hillary Black // Mav. https://hiremav.com/

Conspiracy Theory Development Dialogues.png — Our script moving through development in Alexa Conversations.

Visual Design and Branding

Our visual and video design process kicks off this week! A mid-fi wireframe was recently created to capture the visual imagery and presentation of the product and determine the tone and branding of our main image and logo. While it's a voice project, our project must be visually packaged with vision and passion for users to find and play on Amazon.

We are very proud to have worked so well together as a team, and a very international team at that. We learned to use Alexa Conversations and improved on the developing and design side through the process. We followed a scrum methodology, with daily standups to make the deadline, working around different time zones where so many of us were "in the future". We finished our MVP with a very short turn around time and are excited to continue moving the game forward.

We faced a series of obstacles which we are proud to have solved together.

We are a six person team with members in three countries, four different time zones and working in two languages. Work was often started by one team member and completed by another, requiring excellent communication to avoid bottlenecks and duplication of work.
Our team had never worked together before and for the majority of the team this was their first voice project and first hackathon.
We worked with many new processes and tools, both on the design side and the developer side. Many of these processes are not documented by the larger community, requiring strong improvisation and recovery skills as we went along.
Alexa conversation is in beta so a lot of code needed to be created from scratch. Blogs with examples and information don't yet exist in English, and much less in Spanish, the language our developers work in. This added a double workload to our developers, as this project was limited to the US version of Alexa.
Conversation design tools such as Voiceflow and Botmock aren't yet able to be integrated with Alexa Conversations (beta) which meant we needed to recreate their functions with other design tools.
There were a large number of conspiracy theories that needed to be organized and investigated before choosing one and developing a natural flow of puzzles around it.