Do Make me Think!: How CUIs Can Support Cognitive Processes

Traditionally, a key concern of HCI has been to design interfaces that should not make the user think. While this is - and will continue to be - desirable for most systems, there are also situations in which a system that prompts and questions the user may be more appropriate. In educational systems for instance, tasks are often intentionally made more challenging to enable "deeper" thinking and more thorough learning. Although conversational interfaces are still relatively limited in their capabilities, they seem very promising for contexts where questioning is needed, such as learning, analytics or sensemaking as well as safety-critical systems. Overly simple interactions - such as when the user can just tap or drag and drop - may not be beneficial in this context or may even be risky. In this position paper, we discuss previous work as well as opportunities where questioning users through conversation can be beneficial, based on insights from our own research.