Nancy Philip

Nancy Philip

Design Director, Consumer Apps
#103888870 followers4 following
>10,000All time
7 KP

About

I've been designing things people touch with their thumbs for over a decade now, and I still get a small thrill when a screen feels right on the first try. My team jokes that I can spot a misaligned button from across the room. They're not wrong. What I actually care about is the moment a person stops thinking about the interface and just does the thing. That takes ruthless editing, and a willingness to kill work you loved. I've thrown away more good designs than most people have made, and I'd do it again.

Forums

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7d ago

The Thing I Built That Was Too Late to Matter

I built a feature last year that I had been planning for months. It was good. It worked. It was also six months too late.

The people who wanted it had already found a workaround. The competitors had already shipped their version. The problem had already been solved by time, in a way I did not anticipate.

Vaani Developer Platformp/vaani-developer-platfrom•

11d ago

How do you handle callers who code-switch? Do you lock the language, follow the caller, or ask them?

Our callers mix Hindi and English in the same breath: "haan toh mein bol raha tha, why are you calling me?" We assumed language handling was a detection problem. It turned out to be about six separate problems, and we found them one at a time, in production.

1. Detecting a language switch without flip-flopping
A caller says one English word and the bot jumps languages. We settled on a heuristic switch with guardrails you can configure per agent:

  • a minimum number of words per turn (default 3)

  • the same language for consecutive turns (default 2)

  • a dominant-language threshold (0.6) from a fastText classifier

  • a reset of the counter on mismatch, so one stray turn doesn't count

  • "meta" references ignored, for example someone saying "English" while speaking Hindi

2. Callers who just tell you what they want
"Let's speak in English" shouldn't need two confirming turns. We added explicit request detection, in English and Hindi (e.g. " "). It bypasses the heuristics and switches immediately.

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