Exploring a voice user interface to convey information in an e-commerce website

Sammanfattning: Screen readers for visually impaired users are poorly optimized for e-commerce websites hence the exclusion of the content. It creates a societal need for accessibility of the content in e-commerce websites for the visually impaired users. This study explores how six blindfolded participants could co-design a Voice User Interface (VUI) in an e-commerce website to convey its information that creates a good user experience for visually impaired. The result of a co-design workshop with interaction design practices showed that a VUI should be humanlike and convey relevant information. Failed speech recognition and overwhelming information had a negative impact on the user experience. To cope with the problems, the VUI should provide more control to the users by conveying explicit confirmations and retrospective information from past shopping trips. Due to the difficulties in finding visually impaired participants, the design process was not completed hence the ideation needs an additional design process.