Feedback
Signal expectation gaps or errors in the model – but is that clear to the user?
Overview:
Giving users the ability to rate their interactions has become a table stakes pattern in service and conversational experiences (think chat support, or Uber).
On its face this pattern is rather tame and familiar. Its potential risk factor may be buried and hidden to the user. What happens after they rate their experience?
- In scenario A, the user knows they have been interacting with the model. A thumbs-up or down signals to prompt engineers whether the design of the model itself is effective. This could be especially helpful for proprietary internal models or secure models trained on sensitive data.
- In scenario B, the user doesn’t know if they are interacting with a human or a model. OR they don’t know what experiments the company is running to potential replace human engagement with digital engagement. Even an average person could feel put off by the ethical implications from that lack of transparency.
This pattern is fairly standardized, as thumbs or stars, with a few outliers. We should not expect it to change much.
What we should expect to see, or at least hope to see, is more information about what happens based on the user's rating, and transparency to the user about whether they are rating the response to their request, or the model as a whole.
Benefits:
Anti-patterns:
Ethical risk
If some cases this information is used to determine how well the model is performing at replacing human labor (as opposed to simply tuning the model itself). People could be upset to learn that their input is helping to displace people from jobs. Companies should be upfront about how they are using this data.
No immediate value
If no additional affordance is provided to improve the user's experience, companies are collecting user data with no immediate or cathartic value returned in exchange [“if the service is free, you are the product”]. Avoid this by offering suggestions to the user for how to get better results, or teach them how to improve their results by giving their feedback directly to the bot.
