PlanHelper: Supporting Activity Plan Construction with Answer Posts in Community-Based QA Platforms

C Liu, Z Huang, D Liu, S Zhou, Z Peng… - Proceedings of the ACM on …, 2022 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2022dl.acm.org
Community-based Question Answering (CQA) platforms can provide rich experience and
suggestions for people who seek to construct Activity Plans (AP), such as bodybuilding or
sightseeing. However, answer posts in CQA platforms could be too unstructured and
overwhelming to be easily applied to AP construction, as validated by our formative study for
understanding relevant user challenges. We therefore proposed an answer-post processing
pipeline, based on which we built PlanHelper, a tool assisting users in processing the CQA …
Community-based Question Answering (CQA) platforms can provide rich experience and suggestions for people who seek to construct Activity Plans (AP), such as bodybuilding or sightseeing. However, answer posts in CQA platforms could be too unstructured and overwhelming to be easily applied to AP construction, as validated by our formative study for understanding relevant user challenges. We therefore proposed an answer-post processing pipeline, based on which we built PlanHelper, a tool assisting users in processing the CQA information and constructing AP interactively. We conducted a within-subject study (N=24) with a Quora-like interface as the baseline. Results suggested that when creating AP with PlanHelper, users were significantly more satisfied with the informational support and more engaged during the interaction. Moreover, we performed an in-depth analysis on the user behaviors with PlanHelper and summarized the design considerations for such supporting tools.
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