Polite or Direct? Conversation Design with Politeness Theory on a Smart Display for Older Adults

Title of the Paper

Polite or Direct? Conversation Design of a Smart Display for Older Adults Based on Politeness Theory

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Conversation design for smart devices based on politeness theory, particularly focusing on design and optimization for older users.
• Keywords: Conversation design, politeness theory, multimodal interaction, smart display, older users

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues and Challenges: The study aims to address the poor user experience of older adults caused by inefficient conversation design in smart devices. Current smart display devices struggle to balance interaction efficiency and polite communication, especially for older users, where multi-turn dialogues may become overly complex and increase cognitive load.
• Significance: Smart display devices can assist older adults in overcoming visual and motor impairments, and polite language may be key to optimizing the interaction experience. However, there is a need to balance the trade-off between direct, efficient language interaction and politeness strategies.
• Motivation and Related Work: Inspired by Grice's maxims of conversation and Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, the authors explore the use of language strategies to optimize multimodal smart device conversation design and improve interaction experiences. This study focuses specifically on the needs of older users, offering solutions through politeness strategies and direct dialogue models.

Solution

• Proposed Solution:
  1. Based on politeness theory, the dialogue interaction system between older users and smart devices is categorized into seven types of speech acts: requests, suggestions, instructions, comments, greetings, farewells, and corrections.
  2. Develop corresponding politeness strategies for different speech acts, such as positive politeness (enhancing positive self-image) and negative politeness (minimizing threats to user autonomy).
  3. Design two system versions: a direct language system and a polite language system, and compare them through online studies and on-site deployment experiments.
• Innovativeness: This is the first systematic application of politeness theory to the conversation design of smart display devices, with customized design strategies tailored for older users.
• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:
  1. Implement the two systems on the Google Nest Hub Max platform and use Google's Interactive Canvas framework to create interaction models.
  2. Conduct online experiments to evaluate the impact of politeness strategies on the perceived politeness of voice assistants (64 participants).
  3. Conduct on-site experiments where 15 older participants use both the direct and polite systems at home for five days each, collecting quantitative and qualitative data.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:
  1. Speech interactions were categorized into seven types of speech acts, and politeness theory was successfully applied to conversation design.
  2. Through on-site experiments and surveys, five key factors influencing older users' experiences were identified: overall preference for politeness, interaction goals, perception of the device's role, interaction patterns, and choice of interaction methods.
  3. Proposed four user personas: "socially-oriented followers," "functionally-oriented followers," "socially-oriented leaders," and "functionally-oriented leaders," to guide personalized system design.
• Advantages: Compared to traditional conversation design, politeness strategies offer significant advantages in improving user acceptance of interactions and innovatively enhancing the perception of voice interactions.
• Experimental Results: The study found that politeness language strategies positively impact the perceived politeness of voice interactions and the quality of voice interaction. However, they were less effective than direct language systems in terms of error tolerance.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. Cultural factors were not fully considered, and the universality of politeness strategies may be limited by cultural differences.
  2. Technical limitations of the devices, such as speech recognition errors and loading speed, had a notable impact on user experience.
  3. Future research is recommended to explore the cultural adaptability of different speech acts and to optimize device technical capabilities to support more politeness strategies.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that polite language can enhance the experience of older users without compromising interaction efficiency, validating the potential of politeness strategies in the design of smart display devices. By innovatively applying politeness theory to conversation paradigms, the authors propose important design recommendations for personalized smart devices, contributing significantly to academia and offering potential practical applications.