conversational agents such as Alexa Google Assistant and Siri have become progressively
integrated into our lives as evidenced by their increased use at home and in sectors such as
education healthcare e-commerce and business as CAs are joining the stream of technology
revolution they could bring us both positive and negactive effects, if not properly designed they
may pose risks such as issues around privacy and fairness on the other hand CAs enable hands-free
interactions and they've become ubiquitous and may affect many aspects of our lives this reminds us
of the need to design CAs responsibly to reduce negative effects and to create positive ones
so the question is how to design CAs to bring positive experiences to users
self-determination theory has been shown helpful this theory suggests
that considering the fulfilment of psychological needs namely competence autonomy and relatedness
could result in substantial benefits such as enhanced use experience and human flourishing
however this theory has not yet been applied to the design of CAs it is unknown what users expect
from CAs regarding the three needs and how such needs could be supported through design to answer
these questions first we conducted an interview study with 14 participants where we unpacked what
the three psychological needs mean to CA users and summarize the implications to design for the needs
second we consolidated the implications into 10 actionable guidelines and compare the
guidelines to existing ones in the literature here are the results the feeling of competence
was undermined when users had ineffective communication with the CA or when they felt
that they didn't know all of the CA capabilities in your own words didn't use CA to the full list
the findings show that users felt they only knew the basic functions of the CA such as setting
alarms or play music and they ended up only using these functions the fast development of
CA capabilities has made it even difficult for the user to gain a clear picture of what the CA can do
participants reported feeling overwhelmed by the unknown potential of CAs and such a feeling could
decrease the sense of competence in response to this our research suggests designing to
educate users about the capabilities of CAs and to support discoverability for example
through personalized overview or to provide convenient access
to relevant capabilities autonomy was affected by how the user had control over the conversations
and the level of personalization the data showed that the sense of control was often limited and
the interaction was more driven by the CA than the user in other words the user had to adapt
to the CA's way of operating that is predefined by engineers and have little control themselves in
response to this this research suggests to provide users with options to customize the commands and
responses for example the user can define trigger phrases for certain actions so as to receive
expected and consistency responses in addition to support autonomy it is useful for the CA to learn
and adapt to user's daily habits and routines so as to provide more personalized experiences
regarding the design for relatedness the findings have highlighted the role that CA's may play
that is to facilitate fun and engaging social activities for example using a CA to play games
with friends or entertain families can help them strengthen their relationships with each other
this is aligned with other work streams in the literature
where they've explored the social effects of CA's such as using CA's to provide
companionship to individuals support team working schools or relieve employee anxiety in workplaces
this paper suggests that if such social functions are successfully delivered CA's could indirectly
improve social relationship between people and thereby increase their sense of relatedness
finally this table presents the findings as actionable guidelines and compares them to
existing UI and AI guidelines in the literature the comparison shows which guidelines stay
relevant regardless of the application types which ones pertain more to the AI applications and which
ones apply primarily to conversational agents you can read more on this in our paper thank you