ProtoChat:
Supporting the Conversation Design Process with Crowd Feedback

Authors

Toni-Jan Keith
Monserrat
Hyungyu Shin
Nyoungwoo Lee

Presentation Video

Abstract

Similar to a design process for designing graphical user interfaces, conversation designers often apply an iterative design process by defining a conversation flow, testing with users, reviewing user data, and improving the design. While it is possible to iterate on conversation design with existing chatbot prototyping tools, there still remain challenges in recruiting participants on-demand and collecting structured feedback on specific conversational components. These limitations hinder designers from running rapid iterations and making informed design decisions. We posit that involving a crowd in the conversation design process can address these challenges, and introduce ProtoChat, a crowd-powered chatbot design tool built to support the iterative process of conversation design. ProtoChat makes it easy to recruit crowd workers to test the current conversation within the design tool. ProtoChat’s crowd-testing tool allows crowd workers to provide concrete and practical feedback and suggest improvements on specific parts of the conversation. With the data collected from crowd-testing, ProtoChat provides multiple types of visualizations to help designers analyze and revise their design. Through a three-day study with eight designers, we found that ProtoChat enabled an iterative design process for designing a chatbot. Designers improved their design by not only modifying the conversation design itself, but also adjusting the persona and getting UI design implications beyond the conversation design itself. The crowd responses were helpful for designers to explore user needs, contexts, and diverse response formats. With ProtoChat, designers can successfully collect concrete evidence from the crowd and make decisions to iteratively improve their conversation design.

System

ProtoChat supports designers to rapidly iterate on the conversation design by allowing designers to create conversation sequences, quickly test the designed conversation with the crowd, analyze the crowd-tested conversation data, and revise the conversation design. These features are manifested in two main interfaces: the designer interface and the crowd-testing interface.

Crowd Interactions

When using the crowd-testing interface, crowd workers can perform three kinds of interaction in the designed conversation: (a) follow the conversation flow and add a user-side response, (b) add a bot-side utterance, or (c) add a branch on the user’s side.

Result

3 patterns of analyzing crowd responses

By analyzing the crowd responses, designers could explore the user needs, contexts and diverse response format which are essential to know for the successful conversation design.

5 design improvement patterns with collected evidence from the crowd

Designers revised their design by consulting diverse feedback and suggestions from the crowd. Revisions occurred at both high level by changing the order of the conversation or low-level by adding options or changing the tone of an utterance. Designers improved their conversation design with ProtoChat in five major patterns.

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Publications

CSCW 2020
ProtoChat: Supporting the Conversation Design Process with Crowd Feedback
Yoonseo Choi, Toni-Jan Keith Monserrat, Jeongeon Park, Hyungyu Shin, Nyoungwoo Lee, Juho Kim
CSCW 2020 Demo
ProtoChat: Supporting the Conversation Design Process with Crowd Feedback
Yoonseo Choi, Toni-Jan Keith Monserrat, Jeongeon Park, Hyungyu Shin, Nyoungwoo Lee, Juho Kim
CUI2020
CHI 2020 Workshop on CUI@CHI
Leveraging the Crowd to Support the Conversation Design Process
Yoonseo Choi, Hyungyu Shin, Toni-Jan Keith Monserrat, Nyoungwoo Lee, Jeongeon Park, Juho Kim
CHI 2020 LBW
Supporting an Iterative Conversation Design Process
Yoonseo Choi, Hyungyu Shin, Toni-Jan Keith Monserrat, Nyoungwoo Lee, Jeongeon Park, Juho Kim
This work was supported by Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (IO180410-05205-01).