Masterarbeit
Researching the Chatbot User Interface — A Quantitative Study of Chatbot Design Pattern Implementations
Completion
2026/02
Research Area
Students
Ammad Idrees
Advisers
Verena Traubinger M.Sc.
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Heil
Description
The increasing use of chatbots in a variety of industries emphasizes how crucial they are to improving user interactions and public service delivery. As chatbots are widely used, particularly in high-engagement industries such as e-commerce, chatbot quality and user satisfaction are a relevant topic. Design patterns in the User Interface variety and depend on several factors, including target audiences, business goals, and use cases. The effect of how these design patterns are implemented (e.g. placement, shape, colour, …) is not yet researched on. This thesis aims to address the need for a systematic and user-centric evaluation on chatbot design pattern implementation and thus wants to establish a foundation for future research.
This study analyses a comprehensive dataset of chatbot implementations to identify common variations of chatbot design pattern implementations. From this analysis, a catalogue of frequently occurring implementation styles will be compiled. For the quantitative user study, a configurable chatbot editor utilizing Atomic Design and Design Tokens will be created with which the personally preferred chatbot UI can be created. With this, insights into preferences for specific implementations should be gained in a survey, followed by the use of the editor with an evaluation of the final chatbot interface.
The objective of this thesis is the creation of a solution or the combination of existing approaches to solve the problem described above of providing basic insights into user preferences on chatbot design pattern implementations. This comprises the following parts. An analysis of the state of the art on web chatbots, current chatbot interface research, design patterns, current chatbot technologies, and other relevant work. The prototypical implementation should include the development of a configurable editor which will be used for the user study. A quantitative user study should be conducted where the prototype is used and the created chatbot user interface is evaluated. The user study and the prototype have to be based and evaluated on their compliance with elicited requirements based on the literature research.
