Designing everyday conversational agents for managing health and wellness: A study of alexa skills reviews

Abstract

Conversational agents have been developed for supporting a wide array of areas, including autonomous vehicles, decision making, and health behavior change. In the last few years, conversational agents increasingly became available as everyday technologies. This phenomenon enables opportunities for finding novel ways to support health and wellness in everyday contexts. By conducting a content analysis of 433 user reviews of Amazon Alexa's Skills, the goal of this study is two-fold: (1) Extract users' perceived strengths of conversational agents in everyday health and wellness management, (2) develop design heuristics for developing conversational agents for health and wellness. We found that the role of trustworthy content providers is critical during the adoption. The Skills enabled people to overcome logistical barriers to improving daily health and wellness routines. The findings also revealed the importance of transparency in the limitations of the Skill and how to better design command dialogues. We present the design heuristics of conversational agents, building on Nielsen's Usability Heuristics, and discuss implications for designing conversational agents that support health and wellness.