Hertz Alexa Skill

Hertz Alexa Skill

Voice UI · Conversational Design · UX Research · Innovation · NLP Prototyping

Voice UI · Conversational Design · UX Research · Innovation · NLP Prototyping

Timeline
8 Months
My Title
UX/UI Designer
Website
Hertz

Before

Hertz needed a voice-enabled solution to simplify car rental and reservation management through Alexa.

Challenges included:

  • Designing a stateless, natural conversational flow

  • Working within Alexa’s 2017-era limitations

  • Integrating with Hertz’s inflexible legacy backend

What I did

  • Sole designer: owned end-to-end UX, utterance design, tone, and skill flow

  • Created a stateless logic tree allowing flexible input and graceful fallback responses

  • Wrote and maintained a massive utterance set—handling verb tense, contractions, and user recovery flows

  • Manually tested 60,000+ scenarios from a 100,000-case matrix

  • Designed visual artifacts: post-it stringboards, flowcharts, and early marketing visuals

  • Collaborated closely with engineers to stitch together complex reservation logic

Impact

  • VUI requires more than UX intuition; tone, recovery, and utterance planning are critical

  • Stateless design is possible with careful logic and tone scaffolding

  • Even discontinued pilots can drive innovation and sharpen technical creativity

content and all work by Grace Duenas

content and all work by Grace Duenas

content and all work by Grace Duenas