User experience and product design: Add a bio to personalize the cards

If you have any experience with AAC apps, you know personalization makes all the difference. A grid of generic words or auto phrases can only help so much—we needed something that was personalized to us, with names of grandkids, their ages, schools, and sports teams, local restaurants and foods we like, doctors, and all of the little details that make for richer conversations with family and friends.

From a design perspective, there are a lot of ways to create an experience that retains individual details and personalizes the suggestions. Lots more to come here. For our first iteration, we created an editable bio under Account Settings.

To personalize your Broca experience, go to your username in the upper lefthand corner and select Account Settings.

Your Personal Bio is an open-ended text box for you to add whatever detail you like. In our example, we’ve included information about family members and spouses, grandkids, work and coworkers, doctors, our city, and some favorite restaurants.

Remember to hit the Save Changes button when you’re done. Edit, add, or remove details from your bio anytime. Your bio is only visible to you.

The details you include here will help give the experience context. The next time you start a conversation, if a topic comes up that references some of the people, places, or things in your bio, the suggestions on the cards should reflect that. Update and personalize this experience as new life events come up, and make changes anytime.

To help you get started, here are some details we’ve included to personalize our own Broca account:

• Important people in our life: Family members, friends, caregivers, speech language pathologists, doctors

• Pets

• Office: Coworkers

• Places: Restaurants, doctor’s offices, hair salon, dentist, massage therapist, physical therapist office

• Things we like to do

• Education and career background

Now when we ask Broca something about the people in our lives, it has personalized suggestions based on the context we’ve added to the bio.