1. The Chatbot Usability Scale: the Design and Pilot of a Usability Scale for Interaction with AI-Based Conversational Agents
- Author
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Alessio Malizia, Gunay Tariverdiyeva, Simone Borsci, Divyaa Balaji, Martin Schmettow, Frank van der Velde, Alan Chamberlain, and Digital Society Institute
- Subjects
Artificial intelligence ,Design ,Computer science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Usability ,Mobile computing ,Satisfaction ,02 engineering and technology ,Library and Information Sciences ,Management Science and Operations Research ,computer.software_genre ,Trust ,Chatbot ,Human–computer interaction ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Quality (business) ,Conversational agents ,Evaluation ,Autonomy ,050107 human factors ,Reliability (statistics) ,media_common ,User experience ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,AI ,Chatbots ,Human-Computer interaction (HCI) ,Interaction satisfaction ,020207 software engineering ,Focus group ,Computer Science Applications ,Systematic review ,Hardware and Architecture ,Scale (social sciences) ,business ,computer - Abstract
Standardised tools to assess a user’s satisfaction with the experience of using chatbots and conversational agents are currently unavailable. This work describes four studies, including a systematic literature review, with an overall sample of 141 participants in the survey (experts and novices), focus group sessions and testing of chatbots to (i) define attributes to assess the quality of interaction with chatbots and (ii) the designing and piloting a new scale to measure satisfaction after the experience with chatbots. Two instruments were developed: (i) A diagnostic tool in the form of a checklist (BOT-Check). This tool is a development of previous works which can be used reliably to check the quality of a chatbots experience in line with commonplace principles. (ii) A 15-item questionnaire (BOT Usability Scale, BUS-15) with estimated reliability between .76 and .87 distributed in five factors. BUS-15 strongly correlates with UMUX-LITE by enabling designers to consider a broader range of aspects usually not considered in satisfaction tools for non-conversational agents, e.g. conversational efficiency and accessibility, quality of the chatbot’s functionality and so on. Despite the convincing psychometric properties, BUS-15 requires further testing and validation. Designers can use it as a tool to assess products, thus building independent databases for future evaluation of its reliability, validity and sensitivity.
- Published
- 2021