Unpacking 'in-the-Wild' Design and Engineering Practices

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) have been around since as early as 1960 in the form of text-based dialogue systems but there is significant new interest in them, particularly since release of the voice-driven 'assistant' Amazon Echo in 2014. HCI and CUI specific research has begun to emphasise the role of design for voice assistants and other platforms, increasing interest in establishing design frameworks, patterns, guidance, heuristics or principles for CUIs. At the same time, practitioners - while drawing upon their own experiences with new platforms and technologies - are rapidly developing their own body of design knowledge.But the distance between practice and research is significant. Research promotes sophisticated design frameworks and patterns which aim to offer reusable methods for design and engineering CUIs, yet the vagaries of practitioners' work is strongly wedded (understandably) to existing platforms (e.g., AWS Lex, IBM Watson Assistant, etc.). Further, the conditions of new conversational design practice and engineering are currently little documented. Understanding those conditions is vital to ground researchers' design and engineering frameworks for CUIs in the realities of everyday practice.This PhD tackles this problem head-on by engaging in ethnographic fieldwork with those involved in designing and engineering voice and chat based CUIs, to uncover and articulate the (collaborative) ways in which practitioners (and their stakeholders) design and implement CUIs for production-level deployment. By sharing this knowledge with CUI research communities as well as engaging practitioners in the research outputs, the PhD will build engagement 'both ways' between communities as a product of this thesis work.