Understanding Chatbot-mediated Task Management

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chatbots can streamline task management within primary communication channels, reducing friction and improving team collaboration by enabling task creation, assignment, and tracking directly in chat environments.

Contribution

It introduces a prototype chatbot integrated into communication channels and provides seven design insights based on deployment with eight teams.

Findings

Teams found chatbots effective for task coordination

Chatbots reduced the need to switch between tools

Seven key design principles for future task management bots

Abstract

Effective task management is essential to successful team collaboration. While the past decade has seen considerable innovation in systems that track and manage group tasks, these innovations have typically been outside of the principal communication channels: email, instant messenger, and group chat. Teams formulate, discuss, refine, assign, and track the progress of their collaborative tasks over electronic communication channels, yet they must leave these channels to update their task-tracking tools, creating a source of friction and inefficiency. To address this problem, we explore how bots might be used to mediate task management for individuals and teams. We deploy a prototype bot to eight different teams of information workers to help them create, assign, and keep track of tasks, all within their main communication channel. We derived seven insights for the design of future bots for coordinating work.