Project Motivation: College students frequently encounter interpersonal friction as they transition into unfamiliar campus and professional environments. This friction often results in heightened stress, academic disengagement, and diminished career readiness. Traditional institutional interventions fall short to address these challenges because they rely heavily on static, passive lectures or scarce, financially prohibitive expert role-playing sessions. Consequently, standard approaches fail to scale or provide training embedded within a student’s immediate, lived context.
Project Goal: We want to bridge this socio-technical gap by designing, building, and validating context-aware CUIs that serve as real-time interpersonal communication coaches for college students. The project expects to equip emerging adults with the essential social skills needed to thrive in both higher education and the workplace, contributing to a more resilient national workforce.
Lead Student: Renee Olds
Based on the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, we plan to conduct a three-phase study, where phases will be performed sequentially:
Needs Assessment and Communication Competence: we conducted a scoping review of the literature and administered a preliminary survey to map situational friction and baseline attitudes toward virtual coaching.
Design: we will produce design probes that build upon established HCI frameworks and our preliminary findings
User Testing: we will conduct a validation test with users to gather data on the AI-Driven coach efficiency and usability.
Paper publication: The literature review paper is under review and we are writing the results of preliminary survey study.