Project - QuadruBot

What is QuadruBot?

QuadruBot is a human-like chatbot that aims at helping people during self-quarantine, assisting them to search for COVID infomation, receive healthcare services, and recommend movies to watch.

Working Demo

The goals of this project

- To identify in what scenario(s) a chatbot is needed
- To identify how a chatbot can help poeple in self-quarantine

How did we get started?

Needfinding

We have taken the contact approach and constructed 20 semi-structured interviews based on these 6 questions.

1. Have you ever used/seen a robot?
2. What kind of robot have you used/seen?(e.g. physical, voice, text, etc.)
3. What do you think a robot can help for self-quarantined people? (e.g. cook, healthcare, etc.)
4. What are the existing solutions for self-quarantined people?
5. what scenarios a chatbot is needed? (e.g. education, health, e-commerce, etc.)
6. What do you wish a chatbot can help for self-quarantined people? (e.g. chat, health, etc.)

The results show that most of them have used or seen a robot in daily life, in which text-based and voice-based robots are accounted for the majority. That means they are commonly used for human interactions. When we ask for help from a robot, people in self-quarantine are always looking for information like health, diet and therapy. But we also noticed that entertainment is also important.

Brainstorming

HTA Framework

After analysing the needfinding results, we have constructed a HTA framework to envision the kind of interaction mechanisms between users and the chatbot.

POV: User Persona

We have created 3 personas to represent 3 groups of potential users. The first group is those who have tested positive for COVID. The second group contains COVID suspects who were exposed to COVID. And the third group is normal and healthy individuals whose lives and routines are affected by lockdowns.

POV: Ideals & Constraints

1. Users want to monitor their health conditions and receive corresponding health care services

2. Users want to look for some entertainment recommendations to kill time during the quarantine period

3. Users want to search for suitable home workout programs to compensate for the gym closure

4. Users want to cook healthy and delicious meals with limited ingredients on hand

Ideation Mindmap

After having constructed a mindmap and POVs to organize and visualize the user's needs, 4 main functionalities of our chatbot planned to implemented. Therefore, a human-interaction bot will be designed and developed.

Storyboard

How messy and time consuming it is when we have to search for everything one by one. But with QuadruBot, we can search for different kinds of information in just a few seconds!

Verification

Speed Dating

We have conducted speed dating with people who have been self-quarantined, and their feedback to the concept of our chatbot included some great potential features that we also try to implement during the prototyping stage.

Thoughts about QuadruBot:
1. “The idea is great! It is like an all-in-one chatbot and I can chat and joke around with it. This is so nice!!”
2. “When I was going through self-quarantine, I really need some workout suggestions at home.”
3. “Wow this is so creative! And I think it will be even better if we can save the recipes to our phone or computer :)”

Existing Solutions:
1. People have to search everything one by one from: Youtube, Netflix, Disney+, Google, and Other Apps.
2. Could not get help from others, need to search for how to keep healthy.

Possible Improvements:
1. We can improve the chatbot by implementing: Search & Filter, News, Chat, etc.

Four Main Functions:
- Health Info Search
- Movie Suggestions
- Workout Programs
- Meal Plans/Recipes

Chatbot Prototype

Horizontal Prototype - Recipe Search

Recipes 1
Recipes 2
Recipes 3
Recipes 4
Recipes 5
Recipes 6

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Function Flow

Frontend Design & Development

Quick Selection

- The search bar on top followed by a vertically scrollable list of restaurants
- Red and Green colours of cards represent two different restaurant statuses
- Sorting button on the right, aligned with the title

Video Preview

- Click the navigation button to locate ourselves and get the direction to the restaurants

Responsive Layout

- A red dot will be shown on the notification bell icon when there are new messages

The frontend development is based on the design created in Figma. We follow the object ratio, font style and colour code to implement the real one using HTML and JavaScript.

Usability Test

We conducted Zoom interviews and questionnaires with 6 participants. Results are shown above.

What I have learned?

Reflection

Interactions between robots and humans should be as intuitive as a conversation, and assistant between two humans, in different scenarios with different needs. Therefore, what do we need to know so as to create a human-like chatbot is the purpose of taking this project.

I was responsible for the needfinding and data analysis part for this project, finding the need of people in self-quarantine and collecting their perspectives to generate our final solution is a way of understanding and learning from the users. And we really understand that everybody's life is not easy under the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the goal of this project is more than a chatbot that helps self-quarantined people, but also we need to focus on how to improve the user's living experience through our robot designs and developments, so every user can overcome the hardest time in self-quarantine.

It is the first time I learned and attended to develop a rasa chatbot with my team. This project provides a comprehensive interpretation and perception of the user’s needs during self-quarantine to me, which helps me to think as a quarantined person instead of a developer. As the development is totally dependent on the end-user, we need to accurately design every step to make sure the user can get benefit from it. In this case, helping the user to search for useful information about healthcare, workout exercise, COVID news, or providing entertainment method is what we care about and a goal to achieve.

The challenge we have faced is time management. As it is close to the midterm period, some groupmates are busy with their school work, sacrificing the time on this project has caused the limitation of function implementations. So, well time-managed skills are very important for all of us, which may directly affect our project and group performance. However, thanks to our groupmates, we can keep our team spirit continuing in future projects.