Masterarbeit
Designing an Experiment Research Environment for Chatbots - Dark Patterns in Chatbot Interactions
Completion
2023/12
Research Area
Students
Singla Lohitaksh
Advisers
Description
Chatbots should engage users in conversations, offer assistance, information, or entertainment. More and more companies provide chatbots as one of their main contact to users, which means in turn that also more people are interacting with chatbots. The research on chatbots is manifold, from LLM training, dialogue creation, to user interfaces and dark patterns. One problem in the research on chatbots is that the interactions between human and chatbot are hard to observe "in the wild", as their dynamic nature makes it hard to detect any changes in their implementation and interactions are hard to direct. When research on chatbots is conducted in several fields, it is also not feasible to implement one chatbot per experiment, as this creates a high effort. A solution for this would be to create an experiment environment in which chatbots for specific use cases can be easily implemented and adapted.
Dark patterns are often used in digital landscapes to influence user behavior, and shape decisions and interactions. Compared to the extensive research on graphical user interfaces, chatbots remain largely unexplored in this research area. This challenge is further compounded by the scarcity of data sets specific to chatbots.
This thesis researches on how to build an experiment research environment to investigate if users can recognize dark patterns in chatbot environments and which effect they have on their user experience. For this, an environment for scientific research is needed, which will offer researchers a basis to conduct experiments and automate some tasks in the environment itself. This environment should be adaptable to other experiment settings, include a database for different use cases, and include not only an immersive environment with a homepage and chatbot interface for the participants, but also a control interface for the experimenter, which can be used for preparation and post-processing
The objective of this thesis is the creation of a solution or the combination of existing approaches to solve the above described problem of an experiment research environment to research dark patterns in chatbots. This includes the analysis of the state of the art of experiment environments, dark patterns in graphical and conversational interfaces, chatbot interfaces and technologies, and other relevant literature. From this analysis, a possible solution should be conceptualized and demonstrated by creating a prototypical implementation of an experiment research environment, as well as a suitable evaluation based on the user experience of this prototype and its compliance with requirements which were extracted through the literature research.
