Exploring diversity perceptions in a community through a Q&A chatbot

While diversity has become a debated issue in design, very little research exists on positive use-cases for diversity beyond scholarly criticism. The current work addresses this gap through the case of a diversity-aware chatbot, exploring what benefits a diversity-aware chatbot could bring to people and how do people interpret diversity when being presented with it. In this paper, we motivate a Q&A chatbot as a technology probe and deploy it in two student communities within a study. During the study, we collected contextual data on people's expectations and perceptions when presented with diversity. Our key findings show that people seek out others with shared niche interests, or their search is driven by exploration and inspiration when presented with diversity. Although interacting through a chatbot is limited, participants found the engagement novel and interesting to motivate future research.