I am having a discussion with a friend over whether to show or not show entity errors at startup (this is in Silverlight, but can apply to all development techniques).
I made my entry screens so the required fields are immediately marked red so the user knows what the required fields are. He says it's not "the best way" and because of "usability studies", the errors should be shown only when the user enters a value, then removes it again (then the errors should show up).
I think it's just an excuse not having to implement additional code to actually show the errors (because you manually have to validate the entity to retrieve the errors).
What do you think? It would also be very cool if someone could actually post usability studies that back-up one side or the other.
First of all, we need to distinguish between indication of a required field (usually done by putting asterisk (*) next to the field or a little marker "Required" under the field label) and actual validation errors when you highlight the invalid field and provide clear explanation what is wrong. The indication of required fields should be shown from the beginning, so the user, when she opens up the form, can immediately see what information she is required to enter. Such indication is much less intrusive than validation errors.
But situation is different with validation errors. There is no point in showing that the user hasn't entered something until she indicated that she is done with the data entry (by stepping out of the field or by pressing the submit button). Otherwise it is annoying for the user to see those errors when they haven't had a chance to enter the correct information yet.
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I have an Alexa skill that at one point asks for names, and at another point asks for numbers. The names are being mapped to a slot of type AMAZON.FirstName and the numbers to a slot of type AMAZON.NUMBER. The problem is that Alexa is aggressively interpreting even number values as names. (e.g. Saying "eight" is likely to be cast as the name "Tate.")
From what I can tell, Dialog Delegation is useful only if you know exactly how many of each type you need to capture. But in my case there are a variable number of times I will need to capture a name, so I can't just fill that slot once and be done with it.
Ideally I would like a way to programmatically turn the slots on and off. So when I prompt the user for a name, any utterance CAN ONLY BE MAPPED TO A NAME or else rejected (obviously HELP and EXIT, etc would still work). And then when I ask for a number, any utterance WILL ONLY BE MAPPED TO A NUMBER, it won't even try to cast it into the type AMAZON.FirstName.
Is there any way to achieve that? Or are there any other workarounds for scenarios like this?
I'd change the approach you're taking. You have a great tool for validation before even getting to code itself. Click the slot you're trying to validate, then click on the "validations" tab.
Right there, you can add either one or two rules. If you do one, you can add the "not within a set of values" and you can type "one", "two", etc. in order to avoid getting those numeric values inside your name slot.
If you take the two rule validation, you will need to add a "Value within slot types' slot values". That way, you will only accept values inside the AMAZON.FirstName slot type.
You don't really need to enable/disable a slot, you can simply take both in the same utterance. Just make sure you're validating your slots properly and that way you'll avoid unvalid data from getting into your skill :)
Read more: https://developer.amazon.com/es-mx/docs/custom-skills/validate-slot-values.html
I have created a dialog which checks for some Intent and entity to trigger the response, I have also added slots to capture the missing entities. But when user enter the slot value it changes the intent thus causing change in final response. I have tried adding context variable also and deleting it after response but it gets deleted before response and I am getting empty context variable in response.
Like I have added a slot for capturing missing color values in an Intent say 'looking' and color values are like 'I, G, H' and there's also an Intent let's say Goodbye which is also trained for values like 'G or H'. So, when a user fills the slot value with 'G or H' it also overrides the previous intent 'looking' to 'Goodbye' and my final response value changes. What is the best way to handle this kind of flow?
The current intent is based on the latest utterance by the end user. So when someone types in a follow up to a slot, the intent will change and this is intended.
A common confusion is that this impacts the dialog tree. Because when you test it in "Try it out" you see the intent change. Unless your dialog tree is explicitly looking for it after the slot, then it has no impact what-so-ever.
If you do need it to stay the same, then you can send back the intent object in your context. This will disable Watson Assistant from trying to guess the intent.
The danger here is you need to be mindful that what you send back might not reflect what the user has entered. For example, they may ask something that has to trigger the handler of a slot. Doing this will disable that ability.
I have seen some references to the Auto-learn function of Watson Dialog but I can't find coverage in any of the documentation. Can you point me to a source of information on how best to use Auto-Learn?
Thank you for your feedback, we are always working to improve our documentation.
For your immediate benefit, auto-learn is a bit of a misleading name for a feature t, but the name has stuck.
Autolearn has become the "did you mean..." with four bullet points that shows when a user sends an input that has no direct matches.
A little history...at one time, we thought that if a user typed something, saw the did you mean... and clicked a link, their intial input must have meant the same thing as the one they clicked, the system should automatically remember that.
Imagine this:
"What are your credit card fees?"
Did you mean... 1. apply for a credit card 2. cancel a credit card 3. pay your bill
click apply for a credit card
The user was simply interested in that, but obviously the two DO NOT have the same meaning. So we realized thats a bad idea, the system will learn incorrectly. However, we still call it auto learn.
When baking models in CakePHP, should I add validation criteria only to the data which are user input? Or to everything? Or to some specific data? The database consists mostly of things which will be added by admins. There's only 1 user-related table. I'm not sure about this. Thanks.
Validate everything!:
Validation to everything. There's no reason not to add validation to everything. If an admin knows what they're doing, and is inserting data per the requirements, they won't see any of the validation errors anyway. But - if they have a moment of insanity, or just don't know what's allowed/not, then having the validation is a great fallback.
We've all done it (or... NOT done it):
It's understandable for a small/simple project to not want to spend the time adding validation - we've probably all done it... but when asked "SHOULD you add validation to everything?", I think the answer has to be "yes!".
Validation - not just for user-generated content:
Validation is overall great - not just for user-entered data, but also for scraped, code-generated data, admin-entered data, and everything in between.
Can be slightly lax... if you must
If most of your data isn't user-generated, you could always think about making the validation slightly more lax than it would be otherwise, but - having it is still better than not.
I've got a WinForms client-server app that displays various offers in a list. Every user (client) has a "rating". An offer consists of various data including a minimum and maximum rating. If a user's rating does not fall in that interval, he should not be able to take the offer.
Of course I could just perform some server filtering and send a list of offers prefiltered for each user to the client application. But that would surely, and rightfully, lead to confused requests "Why isn't this offer showing up? I know it exists, it shows up on [other user]'s screen."
How should I handle this? My favorite solution so far is to grey out the offer and add a tooltip "You can't take this offer because your rating is too high/low" while displaying greyed-out offers at the bottom of the list to leave the actually valid offers easily visible on top of the list.
A disabled option tells the user:
The action is possible.
Just not right now.
But the user can make it possible.
Unless there is some simple action the user can do to change his or her rating (e.g., by selecting some other controls in the same window), do not use disabling and do not show the offers. Disabling may confuse some users who will then hunt around the window for something to do to enable those offers. It’s a great idea to use a tooltip to explain disabled objects, but that’s not a standard and not all users will think to hover the mouse over a disabled option (Why should they? It’s disabled).
Including offers users can’t have, even when disabled, clutters your display, forces more scrolling, and distracts the users from the offers you actually want them to consider. Furthermore, showing unavailable offers can come across as taunting (“ha, ha, your rating isn’t high enough”) and may diminished the perceived value of the available offers by comparison, resulting in lower user satisfaction.
It seems unlikely to me that users are going to go around comparing the offers on their windows, but maybe you have user research saying they do. In any case, you should label the list of offers to make the criteria clear (e.g., “Offers available at your rating” may be sufficient).
If you want to encourage users to increase their ratings, then maybe include something advertising the benefits of an improved rating. For example you could have a link "-Improve your rating- by four points and get -five additional offers-." The first -link- tells users how to improve their rating, while the second lists the offers as a motivator. The latter link should only be there if the offers will still be available if the user actually succeeds in getting four more points.
That sounds like a good way to do it.
As a slight improvement, if it makes sense for your application, you might consider including the actual numbers in the tooltip, e.g.:
This offer requires a rating between 5 and 8. Your rating is 4.