Looking at the User Experience Through Two Lenses

This week, I researched literature and existing chatbots. From banks, cell phone providers, colleges, and retailers, there was truly a wide range of chatbots to interact with. One thing I found was many of the chatbots used for businesses to provide automate customer service tasks often focused on building a relationship with the user. Building a relationship with the user and gaining their trust is something to consider when we are trying to promote public engagement with technology, improve health, well-being, and access to quality care for people with Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

After careful consideration, I discussed another approach with Dr. Anderson where we inform the user that they are interacting with a bot. Using the training data, we sourced from various Alabama Area Agency on Aging Senior Resource Directories we developed categories of common searches the user may make. Our new project approach is to develop a chatbot that gives the user information search interactions focused on the bot providing information without necessarily sharing a personal relationship with the user. We plan to improve the usability and accessibility by having each category become a button to the user can click on to receive more information. For users who prefer a human-like conversation I will create idioms and designed a variety of pattern answers.

Week 6 Tasks:

• Integrate buttons for users to click on to find information

• Create a new flowchart to map out the flow for the conversations using buttons

• Continue to create targeted conversations

Quote of the week:

“Don’t ask whether you can do something, but how to do it.”

— Adele Goldberg, Computer Scientist, Founder of Smalltalk-80