HustleBot is a Facebook Messenger-based chatbot that helps users beat procrastination and reach their goals by operating as a digital, conversational planner. Designed to promote positive habitual change, the completed form will be a fully-functioning, automatic mvp that employs SMART goal-setting techniques backed by research on the psychology of habit formation. Future plans beyond the scope of the class are to expand the text-based interface to voice technologies such as Alexa or Google Home.

 

The initial question that motivated my work was ‘how do you catalyze behavioral change through new media?’ and ‘what are the best technologies to do so at scale?’ Upon researching these topics, it became evident that you simply can’t get someone to do something they don’t want to, and so I reformatted the former inquiry to ‘how do we promote positive habitual change through new media?’

 

Along these lines, I wanted to emphasize the words ‘new media’ in this project, which is how I landed on building a chatbot. Since Facebook accounts for a large share of people’s online presence, it made sense to build on its Messenger platform, not only because it’s meeting users where they’re at but also because Facebook is often times a vortex for deferring one’s work, and creating a ‘friendly gatekeeper’ to keep you on track makes contextual sense from this perspective.

 

The past works that have inspired this project include TheFunTheory (a collection of installations that sway people towards better decision making by gameifying the experience), The ‘Best Self’ Journal (a goal-setting and self-management planner), and Hello Jarvis, a very simple chatbot that reminds you to do things through an entirely manual, pre-configured setup. From a research standpoint, I’ve dug in to Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Stephen Wendel’s Designing for Behavioral Change and Jakob Aberg’s Chatbots as a Mean to Motivate Behavior Change.

 

My primary learnings from these texts and practices in terms of constructing the bot were to exclusively use positive and optimistic language (even when a user fails a task), to consider the style and tone of the chatbot, to choose diction carefully so that I don’t misrepresent anything (ie: you don’t actually break habits, you ‘untangle’ them), and to create a framework that prompts and perpetuates engagement.

 

Through feedback, I learned to think about procrastination as a spectrum, not only in terms of how much work (or lack thereof) one is doing, but the kind of work they’re doing as well. One person had described their work as ‘hamster wheeling,’ since they can reliably keep themselves busy at work, but the work they’re doing isn’t as important as the work they’re inadvertently putting off. Another person felt that a certain level of procrastination was necessary, and that you can mitigate mental inactivity by ‘procrastinating smarter’ (ie: reading articles related to one’s work). Through this feedback, I realized that I should create a bot that doesn’t just motivate people to work, but empowers them to better navigate how they go about it.

 

To create HustleBot, I used an online platform called chatfuel that enables anyone to deploy their own bots directly to Facebook Messenger. The platform is largely built on blocks that you can customize with texts, images, links, buttons, etc… which can be connected to form blocks of dialogue and interactions. Looking beyond the semester, I might choose to find people who can help me code the chatbot together to create deeper and more custom interactions with users.

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Bibliography:

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Meyrowitz, Joshua. (1986). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford University Press.

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Prado, C.G.. (Nov, 2016). Social Media and Your Brain. ABC-CLIO.

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Wendell, Stephen. (2013). Designing for Behavioral Change. O'Reilly Media Inc.

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2009. World's Deepest Bin. TheFunTheory.Com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw

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2009. Piano Stairs. TheFunTheory.Com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw

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2018. http://hellojarvis.io/

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2018. www.bestself.co/

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