Foreword

When I left the east coast to work in the venture capital industry, I was struck by a number of realizations—east and west coast designers were doing such different things, and the tech industry had changed drastically while I’d been busy in academia.

But the biggest surprise of all was how disconnected the tech industry had become from the humanity that gave birth to it all. I’ve been lucky enough to have had access to a computer for forty years, and I’ve always fought to give the arts a first-class role in its evolution. Yet I found few humanist technologists working in Silicon Valley.

Erika Hall was the exception. Erika represented a point of view that was grounded in not just what the technology could do, but—more importantly—in what real humans needed to do. She was challenging the comfortable models of tech’s “best practices,” like ubiquitously produced “personas”—artifacts that gave the appearance of serving users, without necessarily teaching designers how to listen to them.

I like to tell designers that their job isn’t to be storytellers, but to be story-listeners—people who takes the time and energy to listen to others’ stories. That’s the essence of a conversation: people listening to each other. And a conversational design approach can help designers serve people better.

“Conversational design is truly human-centered design,” Erika writes, and let me tell you why that resonates with me. She focuses on what designers really need to know, including the idea that there is no simple solution when it comes to designing for humans.

At the core of Erika’s quixotic work is an effort to ground the designer’s aspirational goal of empathy in reality. Real people. Real feelings. Real conversations. And above all: real listening.

When designed well, conversational interfaces are able to amplify the human-computer bond—and create a relationship grounded in communication. When they work poorly, they produce mistrust. When they work effectively, they promote trust.

Trust lies at the heart of great design. And trust begins with listening.

—John Maeda