Conversational Interaction Design for shopping apps: Situational
awareness theory
Authors: Jia Fusheng , Chen Xinyu , He Renke 
Published: February 2023

Conversational interaction is crucial to the development of e-commerce.
In order to meet the needs of users, more and more enterprises begin to
build chatbots based on conversational interaction. Conversational chatbots
are becoming more and more popular, gradually becoming the preferred way for
users to communicate with enterprises. Chatbots can provide users with
personalized experience and high-quality services. However, there is no
complete and systematic design principle to guide the design of its new
conversational interface interaction. Many designers have borrowed the
methods of social chat software for their design, which is lack of
pertinence and difficult to ensure the rationality of interaction. The
academic research on the shopping behavior of chatbots is relatively few.
Even the Taobao APP, which is frequently used at present, has not formed a
good user experience in the design of conversational interaction. How to
improve the experience of conversational interaction is an urgent research
topic. From the perspective of user experience, the behavior mode,
information expression and thinking mode displayed by conversational
chatbots should conform to the thinking and behavior characteristics of
users. The design of conversational interaction should pay special attention
to user experience in addition to technical competition. The social
shortcomings of e-commerce sites are a major obstacle to the growth of
companies' online businesses, and there is a lot of distrust among users of
such technologies. With the disappearance of the structure and formality of
the session, the difficulty of maintaining a good user experience increases
and the system loses control of the human-computer interaction experience.
In most studies, the focus is on the usability of conversational
interactions and the ability to identify user queries.This paper mainly
discusses the application of context awareness theory in conversational
interaction of shopping APP, proposes a conversational interaction design
process of shopping APP based on context awareness model and KANO-AHP model,
and explores and summarizes the user experience-oriented conversational
interaction design strategy of shopping APP by obtaining user needs
qualitatively and quantitatively. On the basis of the context awareness
theory, the user's experience demand set of four dimensions of
conversational interaction vision, interaction, function and emotion of
shopping APP is obtained based on the context awareness model from three
aspects of user context factors, product context factors and environmental
context factors. The KANO model is used to screen and classify the obtained
demand set. The hierarchical structure of conversational interactive user
needs of shopping APP is obtained. Then combined with the analytic hierarchy
process (AHP) to calculate the weight of each demand and order the
importance, finally put forward the design strategy. Based on the situation
perception theory and KANO-AHP model to analyze user needs, the design
strategies and suggestions of conversational interactive experience of
shopping APP are proposed from four aspects of user visual interface
experience, functional experience, interactive experience and emotional
experience. In particular, some strategies such as personality
characteristics, high-context conversation mechanism and the same emotional
feedback mechanism are proposed to improve the user experience and
satisfaction of conversational interaction of shopping APP. However, this
paper only conducts in-depth research on the user side of conversational
interaction of shopping APP, and obtains various experience design
principles based on users. However, in the process of shopping, it is
usually the transaction between merchants and users, and the subsequent
research should be carried out in combination with the experience needs of
merchants, so as to balance users and merchants in terms of experience.