We created the characters Agneta & Frida with the intent to strengthen and encourage exploration of information spaces. In a follow-up study we tried to capture whether users found the characters believable, whether they raised affective responses in users, and whether they created a richer more narratively oriented experience of the space. In order to do so, we had to develop new criteria and methods of understanding users ’ conceptions and affective responses. We discuss the study in detail, as well as the general implications for how to perform user studies and design of character-enhanced systems. 1

The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical studies which compare interfaces with visually embodied agents to interfaces without agents, both using an informal, descriptive technique based on experimental results (46 studies) as well as a formal statistical meta-analysis (25 studies). Results revealed significantly larger effect sizes when analyzing subjective responses (i.e., questionnaire ratings, interviews) than when analyzing behavioral responses such as task performance and memory. Furthermore, the effects of adding an agent to an interface are larger than the effects of animating an agent to behave more realistically. However, the overall effect sizes were quite small (e.g., across studies, adding a face to an interface only explains approximately 2.5 % of the variance in results). We discuss the implications for both designers building interfaces as well as social scientists designing experiments to evaluate those interfaces. Author Keywords Computer-mediated communication, quantitative methods, meta-analysis, embodied agents, realism. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

His research interests are in the areas of organizational use of information technologies for competitive advantage, knowledge management, and the role of information technologies in individual work. His work has been presented at the Academy of Management annual meeting and the Behavioral Decision Research in Management conference. Mani Subramani is an associate professor in the Information and Decision Sciences

This paper is concerned with the design of animated agents for applications in e-commerce virtual marketplaces. This brings challenges such as personalisation, believability, conversational skills and multimodal interaction. We have developed a multi-agent architecture for a virtual sales assistant. Agents use high level abstractions for representing, reasoning and planning human-like dialogs. These include mental abstractions such as belief, desire and intention as well as social abstractions such as role relationships and commitments. We design interactions through the development of protocols which specify conventions of behaviour and endow agents with social awareness. Fuzzy modelling is used to model a user’s preferences and subjective perception of product attributes. This synergy between existing technologies has the potential to fulfil the requirements for the next generation of virtual marketplaces. 1

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