Conceptual Designing of a Virtual Receptionist - Remote Desktop Walkthrough and Bodystorming in VR.

Early user involvement in the design of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) is fundamental for usability and otherwise good user experience. In this paper, we present a combination of methods used in the remote conceptual design of a virtual receptionist for a university department. The study builds on two workshops with potential users. The first was a bodystorming workshop in virtual reality (VR) with four researchers at the department, and the second was a desktop walkthrough workshop on an online whiteboard with five students at the department. Proposed solutions from the workshops were deconstructed using a morphological chart into a pentad of parameters: agent, act, scene, agency, and purpose. New design concepts were then composed by combining solutions. Sketching was used to further detail and present the generated concepts. Our analysis of the workshops indicates that the bodystorming workshop had an aesthetic perspective on embodied interaction while the desktop walkthrough workshop had a more instrumental perspective on usability. The combination of embodied but remote ideation methods with morphological chart structured by the pentad is novel to not only the IVA field, but also to interaction design in general. Finally, the conceptual design of a novel cross-platform IVA is proposed.