VUXcellence: Handhold Mode

Nobody can argue against the fact that the Alexa platform has grown in leaps and bounds over the last two years. Many of the problems we faced as voice designers are gone or mitigated, and we have a million tools at our disposal to address the issues remaining. Definitely a good thing, but it leads to a couple new pitfalls. The first is that we now have so much more "rope to hang ourselves with", so to speak. There are a ton of failure modes that simply didn't exist when we were building CompliBot and InsultiBot in 2015. At the same time, all of these new features have upped the level of what users expect out of a baseline Alexa experience, meaning the onus is on skill builders to solve increasingly complex problems. What I want to talk about today is one of these problems - how do you know if your user is having a bad experience, and what can you do about it?

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