Conversational UI Tutorial at HCI International 2022

Join us at the 24th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction for our half day tutorial. Learn and practice what makes a good conversational UI from a user's point of view, and how to design and evaluate such UIs.

30 June 2022, virtual

Kyoko Sugisaki (University of Zurich); Andreas Bleiker (yasashii llc)

Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) have become very popular in recent years. Even though CUIs have been studied for over half a century, it is not fully understood what makes them feel natural, intuitive and usable. As a result, their design and evaluation poses major challenges in practice, and most of the existing solutions fail to become adopted by users and are rapidly abandoned by their creators.

Our tutorial is for everyone who wants to learn about what is really required to make a CUI successful with users and wants to understand the linguistic foundations behind a good conversation/dialog.

We address academics and practitioners from technology and UX backgrounds and offer a mix between business, technology and user perspectives.

As this is a multidisciplinary tutorial (HCI, language technology and study), it is suitable for beginners as well as advanced participants in the field of CUI and will help people to bridge the gaps between the disciplines.

In our tutorial, we provide participants with:

• an overview about the state of the art of CUIs and a typology of their current use cases in practice
• a discussion about what makes CUIs special and different from other forms of HCI, and what challenges and opportunities arise from these differences.
• an overview about relevant linguistic principles for a natural and efficient conversation and a discussion about how CUIs need to work to feel more natural and usable
• a set of 50+ checkpoints that provides both a guideline for the design and criteria for the evaluation of CUIs. They have been evaluated with more than a dozen experts in the fields of NLP, linguistics and UX on their face and concept validity.
• an introduction into conversation analysis, prototyping and evaluation of CUIs
• with a mix of theory, research results, sharing best-practices and hands-on exercises

Sign up on the conference website