Understanding Chatbot-mediated Task Management
This addresses inefficiency for teams who must switch between communication and task-tracking tools, but it is incremental as it builds on existing bot-mediated approaches.
The researchers tackled the problem of task management friction in team communication channels by deploying a chatbot prototype to eight teams, enabling them to create, assign, and track tasks within their main channels, resulting in seven design insights for future bots.
Effective task management is essential to successful team collaboration. While the past decade has seen considerable innovation in systems that track and manage group tasks, these innovations have typically been outside of the principal communication channels: email, instant messenger, and group chat. Teams formulate, discuss, refine, assign, and track the progress of their collaborative tasks over electronic communication channels, yet they must leave these channels to update their task-tracking tools, creating a source of friction and inefficiency. To address this problem, we explore how bots might be used to mediate task management for individuals and teams. We deploy a prototype bot to eight different teams of information workers to help them create, assign, and keep track of tasks, all within their main communication channel. We derived seven insights for the design of future bots for coordinating work.