1. On-Demand Health Counselor User Interface: Implementation Changes and Participatory Design
Karen Fernandez , Mentor: Dr. Christine Lisetti
Affective Social Computing Lab at Florida International University
http://ascl.cis.fiu.edu/
AbstractAbstract
The On-Demand VIrtual Health Counselor (ODVIHC) is a web application designed to
motivate individuals to change their unhealthy alcohol consumption habits by
providing a behavior change intervention delivered by an Embodied Conversational
Agent (ECA). The intervention is based on the existing evidence-based intervention –
the Drinker’s Check-Up – which is a Brief Motivational Intervention (BMI) that adapts
Motivational Interviewing (MI) counseling techniques to short (20-min) counseling
sessions.
In this paper, I discuss the implementation of the ODVIHC’s user interface design
enhancements I performed, and the design of a participatory design study to assess
the ODVHC’s appeal to potential users and gain further insights on their needs.
Alcohol is a global problem that threatens both individual and social
development; it is the world’s largest risk factor for disease burden and results
in 2.5 million deaths each year (World Health Organization 2011). Excessive
alcohol consumption can lead to neurological, cardiological, respiratory,
gastrointestinal, and psychological complications (American Counsel for Drug
Education 2009).
Web-based health intervention programs such as the Drinker’s Check-Up (DCU)
and the ODVIHC attempt to communicate the dangers of excessive alcohol
consumption and motivate behavior change in individuals who demonstrate
unsafe drinking behaviors.
“An ECA is a virtual agent that interacts
with a user or another agent through
multimodal communicative behavior”
(Poggi et al., 2005). ECAs have the
following human abilities: They generate
and respond to verbal and non-verbal
input, give signals that indicate the status
of the interaction, and deal with
conversational functions (Cassel 2000).
According to Linda Neuhauser and Gary L. Kreps (2011), Health communication
can be improved by strengthening health behavior models, designing
communication that is more personal and contextual, enhancing the
interactivity of communication, and creating communication with personal
impact and population reach. ASCL wants to use the DCU model and add
Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) to make the program more interactive
and tailor it for users so that the quality of the communication can be improved
along with user satisfaction.
1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the
real world.
3. User control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose,
and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.
Motivation and Related ResearchMotivation and Related Research
However, Interfaces can also be improved without the use of ECAs. Jakob
Nielsen, a leading usability expert, has developed 10 heuristics to evaluate
website usability (2005).
Enhancements to the interfaceEnhancements to the interface Towards conducting Participatory Design
Audit Page
1. Improved the appearance of all the buttons on the website so that they now
match the overall color scheme.
2. Designed the background image that should go on the Audit page.
3. Also, I have implemented a literal in the Audit questionnaire page that displays
the question number of the current question the user is answering. For example,
“question 5 out of 10”.
4. At the top right corner of the Audit questionnaire, I have put a progress bar
that illustrates the progress that the user has made on the questionnaire so far.
Summary Page
1. At the top of the new summary page, there is a personalized title.
2. I implemented a summary page that shows the user all the available
questionnaires and a blue link to each of them for easy access.
3. In the page, a questionnaire the user has already taken will be marked with a
checkmark.
4. The summary page also contains a progress bar and a literal displaying the
number of questionnaires taken. For example, “5 out of 5 questionnaires
taken”.
After considering the different participatory design methods and experiments,
the following procedure is being proposed:
1. Recruit 30 FIU students who have had at least one drink in the last 30 days.
Due to limits on the resources for our study, we won’t be able to provide
incentives for participants so we will ask a few Computer Science professors to
help us recruit students by giving them extra credit.
2. Conduct three 30-minute focus groups of 5 participants each with the
students. In these sessions our project and purpose will be described. Then,
without exposing the participants to our website we will start the discussion by
asking them the following two questions:
a) What would your ideal ODHVC interface look like and why?
b) What functionalities should it have and why?
The discussion will be open and notes will be taken. We will ask participants to
draw the interface in a dry-erase board as ideas arise.
3. Schedule individual appointments with 15 who attended the focus groups to
conduct a task observation and questionnaire session using the ODHVIC
interface.
In order to achieve better results, e-health communication should be more
personal and interactive (Neuhauser and Kreps 2011). Users should be more
involved in the development of e--Health communication systems and have their
voice heard. Major health institutions such as the World Health Organization
have been promoting the involvement of users in the design and
implementation of e-health interventions for a long time (WHO 1981).
Figure 1: ECA showing different
emotions.
Figure 3:ODVIHC’s audit page before changes.
Figure 4:ODVIHC’s
audit page after
changes.
Figure 5:ODVIHC’s
new summary page.
Figure 2: Drinker’s check up interface.
Figure 6: WOZ interface for participants.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank ASCL at FIU for allowing me to be a member of their
team, especially, Dr. Lisetti for her guidance, feedback, and support.
I would also like to thank the Ronald E. McNair Program and Staff for reaching
out to minority students like me .
4. Schedule individual appointments with the
other 15 participants and expose them to the
Wizard of Oz (WOZ) interface.
5. Follow the regular interaction from the
ODVHC but allowing the participants to
respond openly to the questions as if they
were chatting with the virtual counselor.
Amy, the virtual counselor, will voice the
answers; however, a human expert (the
wizard) will be answering their questions in
real –time from another computer.
The script of the interaction and a recording
of the participants’ facial expressions will be
collected to be analyzed.
6. Debriefing session .
7. Analyze data and reach conclusions.
Proposed design of experiment