I recently had the idea of expanding upon the Winspire chatbot so that it not only injects motivation at the right times, but actually provides tools and resources to accentuate one’s work. Down the road, I think it would be really neat if, say I’m a designer or writer and the bot happens to know that, it won’t just ping me to say “hey maybe you should start working,” but would actually provide something actionable to augment my work such as a website for royalty free images or a free software plugin. This is of course extremely ambitious and might be straying from the intent + feedback I received earlier, which is why I will save this idea as a ‘cherry on top’ situation if I feel I’ve made enough progress to warrant the inclusion of this idea. I did find out that I can target certain individuals subscribed to a chatbot based on certain defining elements, so if I were to have say 1000 users in a year or two, I could then isolate people with ‘designer’ in their job description and specifically send out messages to them. In that way, I can hit several groups of people with something that makes their work-life just a little better, and start to narrow in and curate content to specific people so that the bot becomes more relevant and individualized. The insight that I can target individuals based on key features is one I can potentially begin to implement sooner than this idea, though it would still be something I would do post-demo day.

                  In parallel to working on and speculating about the future of the Winspire chatbot, I’ve also started to prep some additional feedback channels to ensure that I’m on the right track and am allocating effort into the building out the right set of features, overall functionality and dialogue. I’ve started to write out a typeform document that I will send to my departmental advisor Eric Maiello next week, who will then blast it out to everyone in the major to garner some additional insights. Specifically, I’m interested in mapping out a flow chat of sorts that depicts the 5 W’s (when, where, who, what, why) the average potential user engages in/with when they procrastinate. I’m interested in getting more granular and local with what makes people procrastinate, since it’ll be more easy to scale down the road if I start out in a niche. That said, I intend on also posting the typeform to reddit and other platforms where I don’t necessarily know the people so that I can get more responses (in a separate typeform document), and perhaps see how they compare and contrast from what the people in my immediate vicinity think and behave.

                  Once the typeform has made its rounds and circulated by enough people for a diversity of responses, I will then make the corrections in accordance with the insights I receive. From there I plan on setting up some demos to gauge response and garner additional feedback – hopefully I’ll be able to get some people to commit to a 5 or 7 day experiment so that I can see how the bot functions over time rather than in a specific ‘set and forget’ instance.