Expectations on Chatbots among Novice Users during the Onboarding Process

Abstract: In recent years a type of Conversational User Interface (CUI) called chatbots has been more common, these are integrated and used on various platforms such as Slack, Facebook and Skype. Chatbots are based on Artificial intelligence and are a written conversation between a human and an intelligent system. One example is Microsoft‘s chatbot Zo, a social chatbot aimed to entertain. As chatbots are becoming more commonly occurring, the need to study peoples expectations and demands is important in order to improve the user experience and usages of chatbots. In this paper, a study is presented, looking at the requirements and expectations of a chatbot by novice users. The study showed that onboarding is important in order for users to perform tasks successfully. Onboarding is the process for new users to become successful when adopting a product. In the study, eight participants were exposed to two different chatbots, a human-like and a robot-like, and interviewed about their thoughts and experiences from using it. The chatbots is applied to the case of customer support for insurance. The participants received the tasks; sign a new insurance, cancel an old one, get a recommendation for an pregnancy insurance and react on a notification. The results from the study also illustrate the importance of giving the user feedback in form of summaries, give system status of what is going on, sentences from the chatbot should be with concise information, and being able to handle input independent of the formulation. Regardless of which of the chatbots the participants tried first, they favored the second chatbot because they perceived it as easier to talk to with less misunderstandings. This might indicate a learning curve among the users and hint towards the need to design for onboarding.