Timeline: May - December 2024
Alice - Empathetic AI Mentor
Redesigning corporate learning through bio-sensing conversational agents to enhance engagement and reduce cognitive overload.
Project Keywords: Bio-Sensing, Conversational Design, Human-AI Interaction
Tools: Figma, Python, Hume.AI
My Role: I served as our research lead on this project, guiding our literature review and our wizard of Oz study. I also helped facilitate our work by analyzing our research results into actionable insights.
In addition to that, I designed the user experience for our AI adaptive learning feature.
Professional development is boring!
Our literature review told us that boredom and disengagement kill knowledge retention in learning. Our surveys and user interviews confirmed that, overwhelmingly, participants experienced cognitive overload in professional upskilling courses.
Users prefer active AI agents, personalized interactions, and tools to reduce cognitive overload.
Design Themes
Following our research for interactive design we identified 3 key design themes that guided our final designs.
Core Features
Custstomization
Getting started
This project began with a meeting with the team at Accenture Labs. Their in-house cognition researcher, Dr. Adolfo G. Ramirez-Aristizabal, served as our advisor.
We were tasked with scoping out the pain points in existing professional up-skilling platforms, researching how professionals interacted with bio-sensing agents (very nascent tech to be used in the space), and designing a solution that integrates emotional bio-sensing conversational models into the professional development process.
Research
Our client, Accenture Labs, emphasized research as a core component to this project so we spent the majority of our time conducting it.
Literature Review
13 Articles
Primary Topics: Learning Psychology, Emotion-Aware Assistansts
Exploration
Before our research, we spent 1 week exploring the space of bio-sensing AI for consumer technology. This gave us ideas on future use cases and design implementation.
Accessibility
Knowledge Retention
This project was handed off to our collaborating team at Accenture. We anticipate that the research and design concepts we initiated for them will allow them to consider.
Impact
Quantative Survey
60 respondents
Primary Insights: Boredom leads to lack of knowledge attainment in upskilling.
Off to meet the Wizard
So, we knew that active participation was crucial to retain knowledge in learning. Our conversations with professionals also reinforced the notions that online professional development was cognitively overwhelming and isolating.
We were still in the dark with how users would benefit from using bio-sensing AI. When should the agent intervene? Would users be annoyed with the intervention or could it cause too much context shifting? To test these ideas without fully building it out prematurely, we decided to conduct a Wizard of Oz study.
This is a method in human-computer interaction experimentation where users believe they are interacting with a fully functional design.
Qualitative Interviews
12 participants(recruited from quantative survey pool)
Primary Insights: Collaboration a core theme and cognitive overload hindering learning.
