392141 Design principles for embodied conversational interaction (S) (SoSe 2019)

Design principles – such as Nielsen's ten principles or Shneiderman's eight golden rules – are a major achievement in the field of human–computer interaction. They are important both for practitioners and for researchers: From an HCI-practitioner's perspective, they serve as guidelines for making good decisions in the interface and interaction design process so that fundamental design problems can be avoided. From an HCI-researcher's perspective, they can be seen as the theoretically sound and empirically validated distillate of years of research in the field.

The overarching question in this seminar is whether similar design principles exist for human-computer interaction beyond graphical user interfaces and classical interaction paradigms. Specifically, we will focus on (embodied) conversational interactions with computing artefacts, such as conversational assistants, embodied conversational agents, and social robots.

We will start by reading and discussing the design guidelines for the major commercial products in this range, i.e., Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. Following this we will turn to the scientific literature on conversational interaction: We will review the underlying cognitive, linguistic, and social aspects of such interactions, and relevant work in the field of human–computer interaction.

Based on these investigations into the literature, we will then formulate and/or collect design principles specifically for conversational interaction and select the most fundamental/important ones and compile our own list of “golden rules”.