Kathryn Sadler

Nova FM–Smart speaker app innovation

Launch of an industry-first interactive audio advertisement for Google Assistant, inviting listeners to enter an exclusive competition to win tickets to Nova’s Red Room.

My role:  Conversation Designer (in-house voice team, part of digital team)
Credits: Patrick Catanzariti, Senior Software Developer
Platform: Google Assistant

Overview
I joined Nova in October 2019 to explore and experiment with new functionalities and create exciting voice experiences for our listeners, while at the same time introducing unique advertising propositions for our clients.

We achieved an industry-first in February 2020 with the launch of an interactive audio advertisement for Google Assistant. This geo-targeted advertisement invited listeners in South Australia to enter an exclusive competition to win tickets to Nova’s Red Room – using voice commands via their Google Home smart speaker, or Google Assistant-enabled device.

NOTE: Many images are low-res or blurred and cannot be expanded for confidentiality purposes.
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BACKGROUND
Nova Entertainment initially worked with a digital agency to launch its Amazon Alexa skill in February 2019, followed by its Google Assistant action in December 2019.

Nova’s Chief Digital Officer was keen to bring this voice innovation in-house. Due to my extensive prior experience, I was hired as a Conversation Designer to collaborate with a software developer familiar with emerging technologies.

Whereas the initial launches included relatively obvious functionality such as streaming live radio (Alexa-only) or listening to recent podcasts of Nova shows (Alexa & Google), the interactive advertisement and subsequent competition entry were our first foray into innovation with Google Assistant.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

Competitor analysis
We already knew that the best way to enhance our existing smart speaker applications was to allow users to sign in using “account-linking” functionality. This would allow us to offer users greater personalisation and more seamless interactions.

I subsequently started out by looking into other companies with voice apps, noting what functionality they offered and how they handled the account-linking user flow.

Stakeholder engagement
We held a workshop with internal stakeholders from various areas of the Nova business, including Direct Sales and Nova’s in-house agency. The main goal of the workshop was to discuss potential innovations for our voice apps and understand what would be most useful for our advertising clients.

IDEATION
Following initial desk research and discussions with internal stakeholders, I explored many different use cases and potential clients we could work with.

We determined that an interactive ad would have the greatest potential for revenue impact for our business and clients, while at the same time being a fun and original experience for our listeners. I therefore outlined potential user flows to see how we could add this functionality as an enhancement to our current smart speaker app functionality.

Prototyping
I then created some dummy ads and a quick prototype in Voiceflow ready for user testing.

User research
I initially planned to run several rounds of usability testing with external participants, but as there was no research budget I instead had to make do with internal guerrilla test sessions using Nova staff. This was far from ideal as the staff members didn't really fit Nova's target demographic and they already had some familiarity with smart speaker interactions.

I subsequently treated the test sessions as a pilot phase and ensured I was clear about the goals of the testing. I also had to be careful to consider any feedback carefully and separate genuine objective user feedback from any industry bias before I drew my conclusions.

As smart speakers are still a fairly new medium, I felt that the learnings would still be beneficial enough to be able to make some initial iterations. This was also a good way for us to demonstrate the benefits of user testing to the wider company–and hopefully to justify research budget in future! (I also made sure to reach out for actual user feedback later in the project.)

I created a research plan to outline the research goals and questions, with details of the methodology to be used and the preferred demographics of the test participants.

My main goals were to:

• Identify how our proposed functionalities were received.

• Find out if the user flows and interactions were clear and intuitive.

• Learn more about how participants speak to the device – what sort of language they use.

• Establish any standout pain points.

Analysis & synthesis
Following testing, I analysed my notes, listened to recordings of the sessions and grouped user feedback by functionality and type of feedback (positive/negative/suggestion/etc).

Research findings
One of the key issues observed during testing was the topic of user education. We currently have to educate our listeners to ask Google or Alexa to “open Nova”, before they can state their intent, such as play the News, or enter a competition.

This is a broader issue that Conversation Designers and Voice Developers are contending with globally. For now, users have to provide the device with an explicit invocation but hopefully, in future, an implicit invocation such as asking Google to enter the Red Room comp would invoke the Nova action.

Other key takeaways from testing were:

• Users are impatient and distracted - don't be too wordy.

• Keep interactions short and sharp - streamline the flow.

• Consider allowing interruptions.

• Remove/reduce annoyances.

• Let users get to the content asap.

• CTAs need to be memorable.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
I then designed the flows and dialogue for the first interactive ad implementation – to respond to an advert requesting to enter a competition. I also created some more visual artefacts for the Sales team to use when discussing our voice capabilities with clients, such as storyboards and sample dialogues.

Nova decided to launch the interactive ad experience via the new Ben & Liam breakfast show in Adelaide.

I collaborated with On-Air Production, Digital Commercial, Marketing & Legal teams to define the ad and smart speaker prompt wording, record and QA the Nova audios, draft the email content to confirm competition entry, and create a short survey to obtain user feedback.

You can listen to the interactive ad experiences below - one with account-linking via Google Voice Sign-On, and one without (assuming account is already linked).

LAUNCH
Our Red Room competition interactive ad launched to significant industry interest, and – more importantly – we received lots of positive feedback from listeners who had successfully entered the competition via Google Assistant.



Due to the success of the initial interactive ad, we launched a subsequent national campaign just a couple of weeks later with a Red Room competition on the Australia-wide Fitzy & Wippa breakfast show. With this iteration of the competition experience, we were able to apply some learnings from the initial launch–in particular being more careful about how to tell listeners the invocation phrase to use in the interactive ad, in order not to activate their smart speakers with device wake words!