Orange — smart speaker

New ways to test a voice product with no UI: Wizard of Oz before launch in Spain.

The starting question was whether building the smart speaker in Spain made sense at all.

In 2018, from Globant, I led an Orange brief that had to be resolved before designing anything: whether the company should launch its own smart speaker in Spain. Google and Amazon had just brought their voice assistants into the Spanish market, and Orange needed to know if a telecom operator had a place in that category before investing in building the product.

It was a business decision with very little evidence behind it. There was barely any data on how voice was used in Spanish homes. My job was to reduce that uncertainty until Orange could decide with data, and then defend whatever recommendation the data supported.

The immediate problem was methodological. You can't run a usability test on a voice product that doesn't exist yet. There's no screen, no prototype to click through, nothing for a user to react to naturally. So before designing the product, we had to design a way to research it.

I led a team of three through two phases. The first was pure segmentation: sixteen user interviews to map the territory before touching any functionality. Who would actually use this? What was their existing relationship with voice assistants? What usage contexts made sense in a Spanish household? From that we identified three distinct user mindsets that shaped the entire product strategy going forward.

The second phase was harder to execute: validation through Wizard of Oz methodology. A team member operated the voice assistant invisibly while the user believed they were interacting with a real system. I designed the VA personality, the conversation flows, and the test scenarios directly from what we'd learned in phase one. We iterated across five blocks of four tests each, not chasing perfection but trying to understand where the interaction broke down and why.