@inproceedings{1041,
  author = {Stefan Olafsson and Dhaval Parmar and Everlyne Kimani and Teresa K. O'Leary and Timothy Bickmore},
  title = {‘More like a person than reading text in a machine’: Characterizing User Choice of Embodied Agents vs. Conventional GUIs on Smartphones},
  abstract = {Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) provide an interface modality on smartphones that may be particularly effective for tasks with significant social, affective, reflective, and narrative aspects, such as health education and behavior change counseling. However, the conversational medium is significantly slower than conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for brief, time-sensitive tasks. We conducted a randomized experiment to determine user preferences in performing two kinds of health-related tasks—one affective and narrative in nature and one transactional—and gave participants a choice of a conventional GUI or a functionally equivalent ECA on a smartphone to complete the task. We found significant main effects of task type and user preference on user choice of modality, with participants choosing the conventional GUI more often for transactional and time-sensitive tasks.},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  chapter = {1},
  pages = {6},
  month = {05},
  url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10295857},
  doi = {10.1145/3411763.3451664},
}