By Cody Peters, student no. 20668174
Our group’s project design, to create a functioning chatbot that would act as a facilitation tool for individuals seeking assistive technology, was an absolute pleasure to work on. Every member of the group, myself included, felt like they had a personal connection to, and an individual stake in, creating a tool that was both supportive and user-driven. As mentioned throughout the site, we each felt like focusing on Woolgar and Issa & Isaias’s texts from early on in the semester was the right way to go, as we wanted our users to both be configured by and to contribute to the configuring of the tool itself. The very nature of the tool itself really spoke to each of us; it was meant to be assistive in nature. Not an all-knowing and self-proclaimed expert on the needs of the user, but rather to offer a scaffolded and assisted avenue for the user themselves to describe their own needs and to find a tool that spoke to their own unique circumstances and uses.
In regard to how we assessed and demonstrated usability, we heavily focused our efforts in selecting tools that centered around their respective uses for their own niche areas of support. The tools that we integrated into Aidee were each vetted by myself and each of the other group members for how well they would facilitate assistance to the user, rather than how profitable or how “commercially successful” they were for the company that developed them. This was a difficult task, and I know for a fact that both myself and my group members expressed how frustrating it was to try and sift through the multitude of add-riddled google search results to find tools that were genuinely supportive in nature.
As for our design process, the process was difficult and time consuming but in the end worthwhile. We tried to use several different engines to make the chatbot as user-friendly as possible, but the majority of the tools that we experimented with were simply not very intuitive to work with or to use as a user (looking at you, IBM’s Watson Assistant). In the end we settled on using Miro as a form of brainstorming and mind-mapping what topics and tools we would integrate and how each of them related to the wider array of assistive technology areas that we wanted to cover. Utilizing this, we then implemented our decision trees into AppyPie to create a functioning question-response system that would work for our chatbot. As to what I would change in the future, I would try to generate a more tightly-centered area of research. Assistive technology is such a long-reaching term that it can refer to anything from a wheelchair to fully digitally integrated smartphone app. As individuals, we could only consider tools that made sense to us and that we felt like we could express some level of individual experience or “ownership” over their application, as we didn’t want to propose a tool that we had no relation to or experience with; we wanted to create as genuinely assistive of an atmosphere as possible.
Lastly, my specific role throughout the project was to facilitate research, relate information to course topics, perform written tasks and to assist others with their editing and writing. We all contributed to different aspects of the tool itself, but there was a real sense of collaboration as we each took the time to offer feedback and to assist each other in our different areas as often as possible. We all made the effort in troubleshooting the bot itself, we all contributed to the research, we all offered design and functional feedback and made changes and additions to the website’s design and function, and we all collaborated to ensure everyone had a voice and that everyone’s personal experience was represented in every aspect of the tool and the presentation. It was very important to all of us to have as communal and collaborative an approach as possible to this project as we could, as I mentioned earlier that we all felt like we were personally invested in the creation of this tool. This was a fantastic group of individuals that I would love to work with again. A very fulfilling project that I am proud to have played a part in creating.
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