Designing Great Shortcuts

Hi. I'm Jay. I'm a designer on the Siri and Shortcuts team. And today, we'll be talking about how to design great shortcuts for your apps.

We're going to cover three main topics today. First, I'll talk about looking at all the use cases of your app, and deciding which ones might make sense as shortcuts. Then, I'll talk about how to make these shortcuts discoverable in your apps. And, finally, I'll walk through how to design a great Siri experience for the new interactive capabilities of shortcuts in iOS 13.

Now, stepping back for a moment, shortcuts in general are a great way to bring your app's functionality in front of more users in more places in the OS. So, let's take a look at the places where your apps' shortcuts can appear to get a feel for what might be useful.

If you tell the system when the user does something in your app, the system can automatically suggest a shortcut when it predicts the user will next want to do that action. And, these shortcuts can appear in lock screen and search. Here, this shortcut lets you quickly start a guided workout, you usually do at this time of day. If a user adds a shortcut to Siri, by assigning it a custom phrase, they can invoke it at any time with their voice. Here, the shortcut lets them order their usual dinner. In one quick confirmation step, the user can get some great Mediterranean food.

Another great use for shortcuts with Siri is getting information hands- and eyes-free. So, to your HomePod, if you have a transit app shortcut, you can say, Hey Siri, bus schedule. And, Siri will speak out the bus schedule information from your app.

And, you can also incorporate your app's functionality as part of a multi-step shortcut. Here, the shortcut handles your evening routine, ordering soup in time for your arrival home, playing your favorite music for your car ride, and showing the fastest directions.

So, looking at these examples, we can see that shortcuts are great for accelerating frequently used, useful actions your app can do.

Presenting information at a glance, or with your voice, or as building blocks for powerful multi-step shortcuts, where your app can work alongside others. We introduced Siri shortcut suggestions in iOS 12, so look back at past sessions for more information on how to develop great shortcuts to be automatically suggested on lock screen and search. Today, I'm going to focus on how to make shortcuts to take advantage of the new Siri capabilities in iOS 13. We're going to walk through how to prioritize the features in your app that might make for good Siri shortcuts.

To do that, let's take a look at one of our favorite apps, SoupChef, which lets you order a wide variety of soups for pickup or delivery. Let's walk through the design process for making a SoupChef shortcut.

List out all the things that your app can do. When doing so, start thinking about things that a user might want to repeat with their voice. So, with SoupChef, you can do things like browse the menu of soups. Order a soup. Check your order status, or view past orders.

Let's take a look at some of these features one by one.

Browsing a menu is a very visual activity that requires a lot of structured information that won't translate well to voice. It requires scrolling, tapping, and navigating. And, it provides information that isn't likely to change from invocation to invocation. And, it's more of a means to an end, and not a valuable action in and of itself. So, this might not be a good candidate for a shortcut.

Checking an order status could be something a user might want to do with their voice, getting a quick summary of information from Siri. But, it's also only applicable for a narrow window of time, right after a user's ordered something.

So, this is something that you could consider allowing users to turn into a shortcut, but maybe only if your delivery periods are long, or have multiple phases. And viewing past orders is nice to have, but I don't know about you, I'm not regularly checking that. So, not a great shortcut.

Ordering a soup is a very valuable activity. In fact, the most important activity of your app. And, you can imagine it being repeatable if a user has a favorite soup. So, let's call this a pretty good candidate for a shortcut.

So, in summary, a great use for shortcuts will be something that is valuable, or interesting to repeat.

Doable with your voice by not relying on visuals or tapping. And, invokable in many contexts. So, the shortcut isn't just applicable during a small window of time. So, now that we know that we want users to be able to reorder soup with shortcuts, let's take a look at how we might make that discoverable in your app. We provide a standard Add to Siri button, that makes it easy for users to see what features in your app can be turned into a Siri shortcut. But use it thoughtfully. Don't do this, where you put an Add to Siri button on every item on your main menu. As beautiful as the button is on its own, repeating it like this looks ugly, and it's not really relevant here. The user's probably just trying to make an order in the first place. And, these buttons are getting in the way. And, these could be items that the user has never ordered before. So, it doesn't make sense to suggest reordering them just yet. Instead, look at opportunities where you can present it in a focused UI, where you have a clear signal that a user might want to repeat something. For example, it might be better to show an Add to Siri button right after a user has ordered something. The logic being, if a user's found it good enough to order before, the user's more likely to want to order it again. And, you're not interrupting anything a user's trying to do. They just finished their order, so this is a good opportunity. To make the Add to Siri button fit in to your app's visual appearance even better, you can now customize the corner radius of the button. And, you can have its appearance automatically change based on the user's light or dark mode preference.

Now, if you've tried really hard, like really hard, and the button's visual style doesn't fit into your app, you can make your own button. But, you should replicate all of Add to Siri's functionality. The standard Add to Siri button shows the user's shortcut phrase once configured. And, this is a good way to remind the user what they can say to run the shortcut. Tapping on it will reveal a standard sheet which allows the user to edit or delete the shortcut.

If you want a centralized place in your app where you list all your shortcuts, it might be too much to have the Add to Siri button on every row, like we saw earlier. So, instead, you're free to use standard UIKit elements.

Just make sure that when a user sets up a shortcut, just like the Add to Siri button, you show the phrase the user has set up the shortcut with. Tapping on it should also reveal the sheet, where you can edit or delete the shortcut.

So, let's get back to users setting up the shortcut for the first time.

Once the user taps on the Add to Siri button, they'll see the Add to Siri sheet, where the user can choose what phrase to use to invoke the shortcut. In iOS 13, your app can pre-fill a shortcut of your own choosing. And, most users will probably just assign this phrase if you provide it, so make sure you provide a good default. Order Soup is a good, short, memorable phrase in this case, that the user might want to genuinely want to use for the shortcut.

Let's take a look at another example, and take a break from soup for a while. Checking the bus schedule. While this might look like a sensible phrase, given how relatively short it is, there are plenty of opportunities for the user to forget words, or switch words around. They might try to say, Look up the bus schedule. Or, the bus schedule for the 35. Or, just drop the "the" altogether. While Siri will do its best to match these to the phrase, users can still get pretty creative when trying to recall longer phrases. So, this might not be the best suggested phrase. Instead, keep it short, at around three or fewer words. Try limiting it to a proper noun, or just a verb and an object. This reduces the chance that users will mix up word order, or use different prepositions.

OK. A user wants to set up a shortcut for ordering tomato soup.

But, what if the user wants the shortcut to do something slightly different every time, like order a different soup. In iOS 13, users can tap on the cell under the Do area, and customize how much information is pre-baked into the shortcut by simply tapping on one of the fields. The user can choose to leave certain fields blank, like the type of soup itself. And, when they do that, Siri can ask for this missing information on your app's behalf. Now, ideally a shortcut has very minimal interaction. After all, it should accelerate people to something that they do frequently. So, when you present the ad to Siri sheet, the action should include as much information as possible, to run the shortcut with just one or two steps. In this case, this shortcut goes straight to the confirmation screen, because everything is already specified.

But, what happens when a user chooses to leave everything blank, and wants to specify all of the details of their order in an interaction with Siri? Let's take a look at how we might design a complete ordering soup interaction with Siri.

Think about what information you need to know in order to carry out a soup request. Like, the kind of soup it is. Whether you're ordering for delivery or pick up? And, if you're ordering for delivery, what location are you delivering to, and if you're ordering for pickup, what you're picking up from. To start thinking about the