Is CUI Design Ready Yet? A Workshop on Community Practices and Gaps in CUI Design & Resource Development Christine Murad University of Toronto Toronto, Canada Cosmin Munteanu University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada Benjamin R. Cowan University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Leigh Clark Bold Insight London, UK Martin Porcheron Bold Insight London, UK Joel E. Fischer University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK Heloisa Candello IBM Research São Paulo, BR Raina Langevin University of Washington Seattle, USA ABSTRACT As CUIs become more prevalent in both academic research and the commercial market, it becomes more essential to design usable and adoptable CUIs. While research has been growing on the methods for designing CUIs for commercial use, there has been little discus- sion on overall community practice of developing design resources to aid in practical CUI design. The aim of this workshop therefore is to bring the CUI community together to discuss the current prac- tices for developing tools and resources for practical CUI design, the adoption (or non-adoption) of these tools and resources, and how these resources are utilized in the training and education of new CUI designers entering the field. This workshop will bring together all parts of the CUI community to have meaningful discussions on how CUI design resources are currently developed, and how we can improve these resources and tools to aid in their adoption in practical CUI design, and CUI academic & industry design training. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); HCI design and evaluation methods; KEYWORDS conversational user interface, voice user interface, design methods, design heuristics, CUI, design methods ACM Reference Format: Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Benjamin R. Cowan, Leigh Clark, Martin Porcheron, Joel E. Fischer, Heloisa Candello, and Raina Langevin. 2023. Is CUI Design Ready Yet? A Workshop on Community Practices and Gaps in CUI Design & Resource Development. In ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI ’23), July 19–21, 2023, Eindhoven, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3571884.3597440 Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CUI ’23, July 19–21, 2023, Eindhoven, Netherlands © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0014-9/23/07. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597440 1 BACKGROUND Text and voice based Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) are be- coming extremely popular in modern user interfaces. These inter- faces are commonplace in consumer-level devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home as well as customer service enterprise systems. Although currently used for simple tasks, such as setting alarms, playing and controlling music, or requesting the weather [1], there is a significant drive to increase the capability of interaction with these systems to more closely resemble natural conversation. The interest in CUI interactions from the HCI community is growing and research in this domain is increasing rapidly, partic- ularly in the design and usability of CUIs. Key challenges have been identified, including the need to: (1) understand and iden- tify aspects of appropriate CUI design [5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 34] (2) identify and develop tools and heuristics to support the design of CUIs [9, 16, 26, 37]; (3) map and address accessibility, ethical, pri- vacy and trust issues surrounding the use and development of CUIs [2, 17, 35]; (4) develop core theoretical concepts to understand user interaction behaviour with these types of interfaces [10, 12] and (5) identify appropriate design for multiple user contexts [4, 33]. At the same time, demand in the commercial market for conver- sational & voice devices and applications is growing. Current HCI research illustrates many existing usability issues in even the most current commercial CUIs, such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Some of these core issues consist of: difficulties with the amount of information that can be remembered, system feedback, learnability, and recognition errors [13, 19, 28, 31]. Yet there is currently a lack of discussion about the current community practices used in CUI design - and in particular, the development of tools and resources to aid designers in practical CUI design. Though some have been developed [20, 21, 28, 36, 37], there is a perceived lack of industry focused tools and heuristics to aid in CUI design. It’s been shown, in a study by Murad [30] with over 100 designers, that the lack of guidelines and heuristics are one of the largest barriers to proper VUI design. This need is also evident in major companies’ efforts to present their own guidelines, such as those from Amazon, Google, and Apple, etc. Current expert designers in industry are also often lacking the proper training and resources needed to know how to develop good CUIs [26, 27], which hinders the transfer of design knowledge to new designers entering the field.