Specialization Project Final Report: Digital Nudge Chat Bot
Life is full of choices and distractions especially in digital environments nowadays. It’s extremely common for individuals to interact with different applications to handle their daily tasks and jobs, such as making schedules or decisions based on different information. All these behaviors require large amount of decision making. Nowadays, it’s getting harder to focus on a particular task given the fact that mobile applications are distracting. How we could help individuals make better decisions and focus on a specific task are what we are interested in. In particular, we are considering the effects of nudges in digital choice environments. To narrow down the scope, we want to leverage the capabilities of bots that are programmed to interact with users automatically. We will be focusing on simple tasks including making weekly plans, writing online documents such as Google Doc, and solving coding problems on LeetCode where people - mostly software engineers - practice interview questions for software engineer positions. We have developed three different bots for these three particular activities. These bots will have interactions with users and send nudges to them. We will see how these chat bots would influence people’s behavior in these specific activities and see how different designs would affect people’s motivation and productivity.