Exploring chatbot user interfaces for mood measurement: a study of validity and user experience

With the growth of interactive text or voice-enabled systems, such as intelligent personal assistants and chatbots, it is now possible to easily measure a user's mood using a conversation-based interaction instead of traditional questionnaires. However, it is still unclear if such mood measurements would be valid, akin to traditional measures, and user-engaging. Using smartphones, we compare in this paper two of the most popular traditional measures of mood: International PANAS-Short Form (I-PANAS-SF) and Affect Grid. For each of these measures, we then investigate the validity of mood measurement with a modified, chatbot-based user interface design. Our preliminary results suggest that some mood measures may not be resilient to modifications and that their alteration could lead to invalid, if not meaningless results. This exploratory paper then presents and discusses four voice-based mood tracker designs and summarizes user perception of and satisfaction with these tools.