Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction

TL;DR

This study investigates how different communication styles of chatbots affect user satisfaction and task success, revealing that a friendly style improves outcomes for female users and emphasizing the importance of personalized conversational agents.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of chatbot communication style on user experience and task performance, highlighting gender-specific effects and limited linguistic accommodation.

Findings

Friendly style increases female user satisfaction

Friendly style improves female task completion rates

Limited evidence of linguistic mimicry by users

Abstract

Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject user study where participants interact with one of two versions of a chatbot called NAVI which assists users in an interactive map-based 2D navigation task. The two chatbot versions differ only in communication style: one is friendly and supportive, while the other is direct and task-focused. Our results show that the friendly style increases subjective satisfaction and significantly improves task completion rates among female participants only, while no baseline differences between female and male participants were observed in a control condition without the chatbot. Furthermore, we find little evidence of users mimicking the chatbot's style, suggesting limited linguistic accommodation. These findings highlight the importance of user- and task-sensitive conversational agents and support that communication style personalization can meaningfully enhance interaction quality and performance.