Informing the Design of a News Chatbot

Chatbots use conversational interfaces to simulate human communication and recently have been applied to different domains due to advancing techniques of natural language understanding and generation. In particular, in the domain of digital journalism, chatbots provide a new channel for audiences to engage with news. However, most chatbots operated by news organizations have so far failed to achieve business growth. In this paper, we have conducted a qualitative user study to better understand users' attitudes towards news chatbots. Specifically, 15 participants were asked to interact with several news chatbots implemented on Facebook Messenger by large international news organizations (e.g., ABC News, NBC News, and BBC News), by issuing a set of 22 sample questions covering various search and recommendation goals related to COVID-19. Then the participants expressed their expectations of news chatbots and the advantages/disadvantages perceived in using them. From these findings, we derive several design guidelines on effectiveness, informativeness, efficiency, humanization, and facility, suggesting developments to news chatbots that may better serve users' needs.