Conversational Design + Research
Conversational Design + Research
Personal project
Q4 2024-Ongoing
Project
Overview
I created a conversational coaching app called In Real Life, designed to gently nudge users toward a daily dose of in-person human interaction. My collaborator Julian and I tested conversational prompts and dug into the science of social isolation, confirming that face-to-face connection is core to human health. Below, I share our visual explorations and generative testing with a custom GPT agent.
The Prompt
This exploration kicked off as a design sprint.
Prompt: "Design an app that reinforces a healthy habit, but limits your ability to become addicted to it. This means you should be able to have a finite experience with the app, not infinite scroll. Reading, walking, calling a friend, not eating sugar are examples of some healthy habits you could use."*
*Prompt from Cassie McDaniels | Head of Design, Medium.com
This project is ongoing and will continue to evolve through a series of voice design, conversational design, and prototyping explorations. Check Medium.com and the Journal section of this site for the latest updates and reflections.
social interaction as a healthy habit
Hypothesis: We believed that a conversational LLM agent could act as an antidote to social isolation by offering gentle prompts for small, real-world interactions within a user’s local environment. The coach would suggest approachable, bite-sized actions based on the user’s current mood, and adapt its communication style to match the user’s preferred coaching tone and personality.
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Product Goal Refinement
With the learnings from our qualitative discovery sessions, we refined our goals to create a coach that learns from each conversation and gradually adapts its tone to the user’s personality. To enable this variation in tone, we iterated on the ChatGPT agent prompt and evaluated the results across two rounds of qualitative research.
