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User-Centered Robots for Municipal Services: What Do Customers and Service Experts Expect from Robots in Municipal Institutions?

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Abstract

The present work uses a user-centered design approach to investigate potential design requirements and user scenarios of social robots in municipal services. Qualitative interviews paired with two interactive workshops compared the expectations of potential costumers with those of administration experts of municipalities. The results indicate mainly similar expectations of the robot’s design and functionality, but revealed different perspectives: Customers thought more about specific design characteristics (e.g. the robots body temperature), while administration experts reflected more on service aspects (e.g. adapting the needs of different customers and especially people in need of support or the robustness of the system). Moreover, precise user scenarios that integrate the different ideas and preferences are presented. These can help researchers and practitioners to extract design requirements and application scenarios that are considered by the different stakeholders.

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Acknowledgements

The presented work was supported by the RuhrBotS project (16SV8589) funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany. The authors thank all participants of the interviews and workshops as well as institutions under city administration making this research possible. Additional thanks go to Pasquale Hinrichs, Anna-Marie Schweizer, Lara Oldach und Noémi Tschiesche for comments on the manuscript. Moreover, we thank Elias Thiele for his assistance with the transcripts and coding. Presentation of this work is funded by the initiative for quality improvement in teaching of the Institute of Computer Science.

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Correspondence to Carolin Straßmann .

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Straßmann, C., Eimler, S.C., Peltzer, I., Hermann, J., Dogangün, A., Roth, S. (2022). User-Centered Robots for Municipal Services: What Do Customers and Service Experts Expect from Robots in Municipal Institutions?. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Technological Innovation. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13303. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05409-9_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05409-9_46

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05408-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05409-9

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