arXiv subjects

Adnan Abbas

Publications and source records attributed to Adnan Abbas.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MAESTRO: Adapting GUIs and Guiding Navigation with User Preferences in Conversational Agents with GUIs

Modern task-oriented chatbots present GUI elements alongside natural-language dialogue, yet the agent's role has largely been limited to interpreting natural-language input as GUI actions and following a linear workflow. In preference-driven, multi-step tasks such as booking a flight or reserving a restaurant, earlier choices constrain later options and may force users to restart from scratch. User preferences serve as the key criteria for these decisions, yet existing agents do not systematically leverage them. We present MAESTRO, which extends the agent's role from execution to decision support. MAESTRO maintains a shared preference memory that extracts hard and soft preferences from natural-language utterances and provides two mechanisms. Preference-Grounded GUI Adaptation applies in-place operators (augment, sort, filter, and highlight) to the existing GUI according to preference strength, supporting comparison among options. Preference-Guided Workflow Navigation detects conflicts between preferences and available options, proposes backtracking, and records failed paths to avoid revisiting dead ends. Through a controlled experiment (N=33), we demonstrated that MAESTRO improved decision quality in movie ticketing: final bookings left fewer hard preferences unmet, and users made fewer selections that violated their stated preferences during the process than in the baseline condition, although task success rate and completion time did not differ significantly. In addition, we showed that using MAESTRO in voice mode can increase users' active engagement as well as their mental burden, revealing the nuanced tension in agentic interaction design for conversational agents with a GUI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

"Having Lunch Now": Understanding How Users Engage with a Proactive Agent for Daily Planning and Self-Reflection

Conversational agents have been studied as tools to scaffold planning and self-reflection for productivity and well-being. While prior work has demonstrated positive outcomes, we still lack a clear understanding of what drives these results and how users behave and communicate with agents that act as coaches rather than assistants. Such understanding is critical for designing interactions in which agents foster meaningful behavioral change. We conducted a 14-day longitudinal study with 12 participants using a proactive agent that initiated regular check-ins to support daily planning and reflection. Our findings reveal diverse interaction patterns: participants accepted or negotiated suggestions, developed shared mental models, reported progress, and at times resisted or disengaged. We also identified problematic aspects of the agent's behavior, including rigidity, premature turn-taking, and overpromising. Our work contributes to understanding how people interact with a proactive, coach-like agent and offers design considerations for facilitating effective behavioral change.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

CHOIR: A Chatbot-mediated Organizational Memory Leveraging Communication in University Research Labs

University research labs often rely on chat-based platforms for communication and project management, where valuable knowledge surfaces but is easily lost in message streams. Documentation can preserve knowledge, but it requires ongoing maintenance and is challenging to navigate. Drawing on formative interviews that revealed organizational memory challenges in labs, we designed CHOIR, an LLM-based chatbot that supports organizational memory through four key functions: document-grounded Q\&A, Q\&A sharing for follow-up discussion, knowledge extraction from conversations, and AI-assisted document updates. We deployed CHOIR in four research labs for one month (n=21), where the lab members asked 107 questions and lab directors updated documents 38 times in the organizational memory. Our findings reveal a privacy-awareness tension: questions were asked privately, limiting directors' visibility into documentation gaps. Students often avoided contribution due to challenges in generalizing personal experiences into universal documentation. We contribute design implications for privacy-preserving awareness and supporting context-specific knowledge documentation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

CHOIR: Chat-based Helper for Organizational Intelligence Repository

Modern organizations frequently rely on chat-based platforms (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord) for day-to-day communication and decision-making. As conversations evolve, organizational knowledge can get buried, prompting repeated searches and discussions. While maintaining shared documents, such as Wiki articles for the organization, offers a partial solution, it requires manual and timely efforts to keep it up to date, and it may not effectively preserve the social and contextual aspect of prior discussions. Moreover, reaching a consensus on document updates with relevant stakeholders can be time-consuming and complex. To address these challenges, we introduce CHOIR (Chat-based Helper for Organizational Intelligence Repository), a chatbot that integrates seamlessly with chat platforms. CHOIR automatically identifies and proposes edits to related documents, initiates discussions with relevant team members, and preserves contextual revision histories. By embedding knowledge management directly into chat environments and leveraging LLMs, CHOIR simplifies manual updates and supports consensus-driven editing based on maintained context with revision histories. We plan to design, deploy, and evaluate CHOIR in the context of maintaining an organizational memory for a research lab. We describe the chatbot's motivation, design, and early implementation to show how CHOIR streamlines collaborative document management.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

PITCH: Productivity and Mental Well-being Coaching through Daily Conversational Interaction

Efficient task planning is essential for productivity and mental well-being, yet individuals often struggle to create realistic plans and reflect upon their productivity. Leveraging the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), conversational agents have emerged as a promising tool for enhancing productivity. Our work focuses on externalizing plans through conversation, aiming to solidify intentions and foster focused action, thereby positively impacting their productivity and mental well-being. We share our plan of designing a conversational agent to offer insightful questions and reflective prompts for increasing plan adherence by leveraging the social interactivity of natural conversations. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of such agents, but many interventions remain static, leading to decreased user engagement over time. To address this limitation, we propose a novel rotation and context-aware prompting strategy, providing users with varied interventions daily. Our system, PITCH, utilizes large language models (LLMs) to facilitate externalization and reflection on daily plans. Through this study, we investigate the impact of externalizing tasks with conversational agents on productivity and mental well-being, and the effectiveness of a rotation strategy in maintaining user engagement.

cs.HC↗