Maintaining character consistency in LLM chatbots.

Designers should enhance the chatbot's character profile to ensure consistency in interactions, thus maintaining children's trust and encouraging emotional sharing.

About this paper

The author introduces ChaCha, a chatbot that aids children in sharing personal events and emotions by combining a state machine and large language models.

An exploratory study with 20 children found that ChaCha was perceived as a close friend and effective in prompting emotional sharing on various topics.

Here are some methods used in this study:

Formative Interviews Exploratory Study

Which part of the paper did the design guideline come from?

“Based on the analysis of the participant debriefs, we identified how they perceived ChaCha's persona and conversation skills about sharing their emotions. 6.3.1 ChaCha's Persona. Most participants perceived ChaCha as a close friend with whom children can share their emotions and secrets. Some participants perceived ChaCha as older or even younger than themselves, even though we set ChaCha the same age as each participant. For instance, C1 thought ChaCha would be an older friend since ChaCha (...)” (Section 6.3: RESULTS)

Seo, W., Yang, C., & Kim, Y.-H. (2024). ChaCha: Leveraging Large Language Models to Prompt Children to Share Their Emotions about Personal Events. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 24, 1–20.

Inspiration and scope

In this paper, authors focused on children's characteristics in sharing emotions and events with a chatbot.

You design to support writing and promote creativity in student writers. Your design and the paper's context are alike as both benefit from enhancing engagement with personally relevant interactions. For children, personal relevance is achieved through empathetic design. Similarly, promoting student writers' creativity involves personal expression and connecting to their experiences for engagement and motivation.

Also, both design contexts can use adaptive feedback mechanisms to respond supportively to inputs. For children, feedback could validate emotional expression. Similarly, for student writers, adaptive feedback offers constructive critique and suggestions to foster creativity and writing skills in a supportive way.

By leveraging these similarities, consider designing a personalized writing assistant offering tailored feedback to students' style, tone, and interests. This way, students receive engaging feedback, fostering a supportive environment that enhances creativity and writing.

Your input

  • What: supporting writing and promoting creativity in writing
  • Who: student writers
  • Design stage: Research, Ideation

Understanding users

The following user needs and pain points may apply to your design target as well:

Personal Expression Opportunities

Integrating features that allow users to express themselves and relate their writing to personal experiences can enhance engagement. By incorporating prompts or spaces for personal anecdotes and emotions, a writing tool can become more engaging and authentic.

Adaptive Feedback Mechanisms

Providing real-time, supportive feedback on writing can help users improve their skills and feel encouraged to continue. The feedback should adjust based on the user's input, offering constructive critiques that are motivational rather than discouraging.

Design ideas

Consider the following components for your design:

1

Implement adaptive sentiment analysis to tailor feedback based on the emotional tone of student writing.

2

Develop customizable character profiles that adapt to students' writing behaviors and preferences.

3

Ensure consistency in the assistant's interactions and feedback through a coherent personality and writing style.

Methods for you

Consider the following method(s) used in this paper for your design work:

Formative Interviews

Conducting formative interviews can help uncover holistic insights about the problem space and draw out nuanced views from stakeholders. Keep in mind to frame questions to elicit detailed and relevant information, and to do so in a way that aligns with stakeholders' expertise level.

Thematic Analysis

Using thematic analysis would help identify patterns and themes within qualitative data, assisting in systematically interpreting and understanding user needs and preferences during the ideation process. Be attuned to recurring themes that can inform and inspire design ideas.

[Figure 4] From this figure, you can understand how a dialogue system's structured response generation mechanism can inspire dynamic feedback strategies for student writers.