Designing Effective Dialogue Content for a Virtual Coaching Team Using the Interaction Process Analysis and Interpersonal Circumplex Models

Much of the research in the field of virtual coaching agents focuses on interactions between a single agent and the user of the application. Another approach could be to give each user a personal virtual coaching team. This makes it possible to present multiple perspectives, and to have coaches with different expertise debate with each other. This could make the content presented more engaging and the system more persuasive. However, currently guidelines and theory to base designs for content for virtual coaching teams on is scarce. In this paper we present a study in which we set out to design content for a virtual coaching team to talk about general health topics with older adults. We based the content for our study on our implementation of two different models from social psychology used to classify interactive behaviour: the Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) and Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) models. After testing our implementation of the models with a pilot test, we conducted an online study with 242 older adult participants. We compared the content modelled using the IPA model to the content modelled using the IPC model. For the IPA modelled content compared to the IPC modelled content the virtual coaching team came across more positively, the quality of their coaching was perceived to be better, the interaction experience was rated as better, their ability to persuade was better, and their group cohesion (task and social cohesion) was perceived to be better. We conclude that the IPA model is preferred over the IPC model when designing health coaching content for virtual coaching teams, and discuss possible reasons why. Furthermore, we recommend designers of health coaching content to test other models to base content designs on, and to measure the impact of differently modelled content in both more and less sophisticated coaching systems.