Sakshi Gupta

January- February, 2020
Study 1: Ash and Syashi, Study 2: Self, Study 3: Self

CUIs are conversational user interfaces that emulate human-to-human conversations, but with machine, in this case computers. For conversational interfaces, systems use Natural language processing(NLP) to interpret, manipulate, and analyze human language. 

GOALS

• Understand potentialities of CUI
• Design and create our own conversational agent using ML in Dialogflow. 
• Speculate a topic of interest related to CUI. "How might the design of a CUI help a creative in ideation process?"

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Exploring non-anthropomorphic design of a conversational interface that helps in creative ideation process

WRITINGS
Link to my writing on the why conversational interfaces?
Link to my writing on Dialogflow which also got published in an online publication.

My Role and outcome

Only the first study was collaborative, other studies were exploratory and self guided. I worked on Dialogflow for making chatbot also available on this website, and then speculated on design of a conversational agent that also acts as a creative ideation agent.

Study 1:  Prototype a CUI agent

I did this CUI study partnered with Ash and for this specific study we followed through 5 steps

+ Setting job description and personality of the CUI
+ Conversation Content- Scenario setting
+ Writing Script
+ Conversation Flow Diagram
+ Prototyping- coding in Dialogflow

Our bot is called Ms. Tea, an conversational agent for children aged 4-10, to help them through their morning routine from waking up to getting dressed and out for school. Her( we gave our bot gender) role is to motivate children based on the collected information(Personalization), help them through the homework, rescheduling, talking through any task. 

We imagined our CUI-personality to be a warm, excited, and friendly. You can find our chatbot here:- (coming soon)
Friendly note: We kept this child user's name to be Lucy.

Study 2: Visual rendition to the conversational agent

Independent study to generate visual ideas for an CUI agent. With specific focus on the 4 stages that a CUI agent will go through while in conversation with the user.

+ User is speaking
+ A dialogue is occuring
+ System succeeds
+ System fails

My idea of CUI was to enforce more organic conversations and hence the designs.

Study 3: 

The final study required us to think critically about our relationship to conversational interfaces. The visuals created in this study would directly attempt to explore and answer my primary research question:

HOW CAN THE DESIGN OF A CONVERSATIONAL INTERFACE HELP USER IN CREATIVE IDEATION PROCESS?

Steps to answer the research question:-

+ Ideation on the concept
+ Ideation on the states of the CUI
+ Successive refinement after feedbacks(4 iterations)

Research

To explore CUI topics we conducted extensive research and read from variety of sources

• What is a Conversational Interface? 
• Articles about CUI on Medium
• Hybrid Interfaces
• Articles about CUI on Wired
• Articles about CUI on Smashing Magazine
• Articles about CUI on FastCo
• MIT Technology Review
• Is Alexa Dangerous? The Atlantic