Beyond Subservience: Using Joint Commitment to Enable Proactive CUIs for Mood Logging

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a promising interaction modality to engage people with self-report activities that are widely used to study people’s experiences and support them with their mental health. However, this potential is limited by the prevailing CUI interaction paradigm being subservience to the user, which constrains self-reporting to being user initiated. A more effective approach would be for CUIs to proactively engage users with self-reporting, particularly at opportune moments. This paper proposes that joint action theory, specifically joint commitment, can be an effective framework to support designers in designing effective proactive CUI interactions. Using mood logging as a use case, we highlight three key areas where joint commitment can impact proactive CUI design. We also discuss wider challenges and future areas of research needed to identify the opportunities and challenges of using joint commitment within proactive CUI research and development.