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Case study 03 · Published research
Prior research found people made fairer decisions in an economic game when making decisions via a smiling voice agent than directly with another person. I ran the study that tested whether this effect holds for multimodal agents, like social robots, from research question to publication.
Previous research suggested that people made fairer decisions in an economic game when they made decisions via a smiling voice agent than when interacting directly with another person. It was unclear whether this effect would extend to multimodal agents, with both a voice and face, driving the research question.
I executed the project end-to-end: from identifying the research opportunity through an extensive literature review, to planning the timeline, designing the methodology, and publishing the findings.
"Technical fluency expanded what I was able to investigate, prototype and validate as a UX researcher."
One of the most valuable parts of the project was learning to build the game environment needed to answer the research question, rather than treating development as separate from research and design. That meant translating an experimental methodology into a working interactive system — from designing the interaction flow to implementing game logic and capturing participant behaviour.
While it is far from a sophisticated game, it gave me hands-on experience translating research requirements into technical requirements, picking up unfamiliar programming concepts independently, building interactive experiences in Unity, and debugging a working prototype through iteration. Try out the game below!
Test ID: 300000
Participants were fairer when making decisions via a multimodal agent than when facing their counterparts directly — a finding that speaks to how humans perceive and respond to agent emotion. The project achieved a first-class result and was published in the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.