Approach Intelligent Writing Assistants Usability with Seven Stages of Action
This addresses usability problems for users of AI writing tools, but it is incremental as it applies an existing framework to a new domain.
The paper tackles usability issues in LLM-based writing assistants, such as coherence and trustworthiness, by proposing Norman's seven stages of action as a framework for interaction design, illustrated with a software tutorial authoring example.
Despite the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as writing assistants, they are plagued by issues like coherence and fluency of the model output, trustworthiness, ownership of the generated content, and predictability of model performance, thereby limiting their usability. In this position paper, we propose to adopt Norman's seven stages of action as a framework to approach the interaction design of intelligent writing assistants. We illustrate the framework's applicability to writing tasks by providing an example of software tutorial authoring. The paper also discusses the framework as a tool to synthesize research on the interaction design of LLM-based tools and presents examples of tools that support the stages of action. Finally, we briefly outline the potential of a framework for human-LLM interaction research.