# OnGoal: Tracking and Visualizing Conversational Goals in Multi-Turn Dialogue with Large Language Models

## TL;DR

OnGoal is an LLM chat interface that tracks and visualizes conversational goals, helping users manage complex dialogues more effectively by providing real-time feedback and progress overviews.

## Contribution

The paper introduces OnGoal, a novel interface that enhances goal management in multi-turn LLM conversations through real-time evaluation and visualization features.

## Key findings

- Participants achieved goals more efficiently with OnGoal.
- Goal tracking reduced user effort and cognitive load.
- The interface improved user engagement and dialogue resilience.

## Abstract

As multi-turn dialogues with large language models (LLMs) grow longer and more complex, how can users better evaluate and review progress on their conversational goals? We present OnGoal, an LLM chat interface that helps users better manage goal progress. OnGoal provides real-time feedback on goal alignment through LLM-assisted evaluation, explanations for evaluation results with examples, and overviews of goal progression over time, enabling users to navigate complex dialogues more effectively. Through a study with 20 participants on a writing task, we evaluate OnGoal against a baseline chat interface without goal tracking. Using OnGoal, participants spent less time and effort to achieve their goals while exploring new prompting strategies to overcome miscommunication, suggesting tracking and visualizing goals can enhance engagement and resilience in LLM dialogues. Our findings inspired design implications for future LLM chat interfaces that improve goal communication, reduce cognitive load, enhance interactivity, and enable feedback to improve LLM performance.