Sharon Ni: Merging Conversation Design and Content Design – Episode 35

Sharon Ni
One of the most engaging aspects of generative AI products is their conversational interfaces. This has led many content designers working on AI products to develop skills in conversation design.
Sharon Ni works on both conversational AI products and script-driven chatbots in her content design role at Cisco. She has developed her conversational design and technical AI skills by attending conferences, hackathons, and other events, by networking extensively, and by experimenting constantly with AI and conversation tech.
We talked about:
her work on chatbots and AI tools at Cisco
an overview of the content design guidance chatbot she built
her addition of "conversation designer" to her resume
the evolution of the people ecosystem she works in, which now includes more engineers and data practitioners
the professional development that she's done to prepare her for working with AI and collaborating with her more technical collaborators
how participating in hackathons and other events has helped her advance her AI skills
some of the tools she uses in her work, including spreadsheets, Miro, and Voiceflow
her personal interest in building chatbots and how it's helped her in professional work
the content design repository where she stores the conversational content she works with
how she helps her colleagues understand how to best use AI
her new responsibilities around assessing the technical feasibility of
her advice to "just do it," to start building your own AI projects and connecting with others who share your interest
Sharon's bio
I love writing products. I hate writing about myself. So here’s five quick things about me and my work in AI:
I’m a content designer at Cisco. Currently working on the Cisco AI assistant and Cisco.com chatbot.
I like trying and building different chatbots myself - I recently built a content style guide chatbot that can help people review their copy and find guidelines.
I’m a fierce advocate for content research and like to use data to inform my content design decisions.
I have a background in Psycholinguistics and received a master’s degree from Middlebury College in 2023.
Huge fan of this podcast.
Connect with Sharon online
LinkedIn
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/4HgM2hp5hpM
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 35. One of the main attractions of generative AI products is their conversational interfaces. This basic characteristic has drawn many content designers into the adjacent field of conversation design. In her work on chatbots and conversational AI products at Cisco, Sharon Ni has applied conversation design techniques and also learned a lot about the engineering side of AI, sometimes even advising her colleagues on the technical feasibility of their product ideas.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 35 of the Content + AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Sharon Ni. Sharon is a content designer at Cisco, is doing really interesting stuff with AI and other technologies there. Welcome, Sharon. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Sharon:
Yeah, hi Larry. Very nice to meet you and excited to be here. And as you mentioned, I'm currently working on Cisco AI system for security, which is part of the Cisco AI ecosystem. And I'm also working on a chatbot that's on the cisco.com website right now.
Sharon:
And other than that, I am also working with the Voiceflow team to build an AI powered content design, style guide chatbot that can help our design partners to find the right guidelines and also review copy based on the guidelines, basically. It's not going to write the copy for them, but it will provide recommendations based on the good examples and bad examples that I fed into the chatbot and also the templates. So yeah, that's what I do.
Larry:
Well, it sounds like you're definitely earning your paycheck, at least three major things going on there. I would love to start with the content design guidance chatbot that you mentioned, because that's like... I think that'll be of interest just probably a lot of people are working on similar kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit just in general about... You mentioned that it's not so much doing, writing for people, but it's more like style and voice and tone and stuff. Anyhow, can you talk a little bit about how that chatbot works?
Sharon:
Yeah. So basically, I injected all of our guidelines into this chatbot. I kind of rewrite it because you can't just put the same... the guidelines into the chatbot. It's not going to recognize it very easily.
Sharon:
And so I work with the Voiceflow team. They help me to write the code part. And then right now I'm just adding more examples from our product, the copy and our product, and also some good examples and we also need some bad examples so that the AI will be able to recognize it and learn from it. And also the templates that you have to provide with the... what kind of response you want this chatbot to produce in a certain format. The reason why I wanted to create this was because we always get a lot of repetitive questions from...
Sharon:
During our office hours or in our help channels, people are asking about whether or not it's okay to capitalize certain words or sentences. And also they're asking about some words that's already... they're in our guidelines. So that's why we wanted to create this chatbot so that people don't have to look through our guidelines. They can just type in using natural language and to find the right thing that they're looking for. Yeah.
Larry:
Right. And you're building that with Voiceflow. And it's interesting, you still have the job title: content designer. But you're doing an awful lot of conversation design.
Sharon:
I know. I know.
Larry:
Working with Voiceflow and all that. Was that a new skill to you? Because you've been doing this, what, a year or so that you've been working on these chatbots?
Sharon:
Yeah, like a year.
Larry:
So you've kind of upskilled to become a conversation designer as well as a content designer?
Sharon:
Yeah, I think so. And I think I started calling myself conversation designer very recently, because I feel like all my projects right now are AI or chatbot related. But also, at the same time I feel like the conversation design work that I'm doing, just wanted to be clear that might be different from what other companies are doing or other content designers are doing.
Sharon:
But I think basically right now I'm doing a lot of the writing for AI and also the writing for chatbots. But also, at the same time I'm working with a lot of design team, marketing, and also sales team to just think of those strategies for AI. So it's more like a new experience to me, but I find it really interesting and I had a lot of fun with it.
Larry:
Yeah. And you're reminding me of... There is... It seems like generalists, or not so much generalists, but people with versatile skill sets are really going to thrive it seems like in this age of AI, because what you just described... And not just skills, but also the ability to collaborate with new and different people. Like the conventional content design roles, there's the product and engineering and design colleagues where you just mentioned that you're working... Well, this has to do with the nature of the products. You're doing the sales and marketing folks.
Larry:
But you've also mentioned, I know in your AI work you're working with machine learning engineers and data scientists and stuff. Can you talk a little bit about how the people ecosystem around you has changed over the past year?
Sharon:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would say in the past I've never really worked really closely with the engineers in the past. Just for our team, we mainly work and support our designers. We're more like a service. And also, because we have a super, super small team. We only have three content designers in our team. So a lot of times we're not the one who actually created the copy at the very beginning. We're more like a reviewing, we're helping them to review and also to edit their copy. And also we have our office hours and help channel to help them answer UX writing related questions.
Sharon:
And right now, I think I'm more embedded in those AI projects from the very start of the project. And I'm doing more than just writing. I know people are talking content designer, only 10 or 20% of their time are doing the writing work, but right now I feel like it's less than that.
Sharon:
We're actually doing more thinking than writing, which is really interesting to me. And I'm in this AI design team and we have our designers and we have our engineers, machine learning experts, and also AI experts and data scientists.
Sharon:
We work really, really closely together because what we're doing right now is we're all trying to figure out together. We don't really know what we're doing. But it's great to be able to understand and also to learn from other people and to learn what they do and also what they know. And I learned so much from especially the engineers about AI and especially the technicality side of AI and also the limitation of AI, what we can do with AI, what we can't do with AI. So I think this is super important.
Larry:
Yeah, that's one thing that has come up in a lot of my conversations, is the level of technical skill that is required to do this is a little more than a lot of conventional content design roles. Was that a challenge for you or did it come naturally or how did you get up to speed to work with these more technical collaborators?
Sharon:
Well, it wasn't easy, I would say, but I try to take courses and also I read a lot of books around the machine learning side