Society is developing at an exponential rate and engineers have become the pioneers of great technical breakthroughs; however, these revolutionary products can only become usable for the public if it is designed with the users in mind. User experience (UX) is the pinnacle of creating value for the user and an emphasis on UX can greatly increase company accessibility and legacy. One way to do this is through interactive chatbots that are available at all hours. Chatbots are becoming more mainstream for businesses' websites to improve the user experience by giving instantaneous relief to customers with pressing questions. Especially for new initiatives, providing chatbots that are constantly available to educate potential users on the company will drive more traffic. The motivation behind this project was to create the best fitting chatbot, namely AishaBot, for the start-up Aisha Comfortable Coliving Inc. whose fun personality and educational tone speaks to the company demographic. After understanding the demographic, dialogues were written for the chatbot with a specific tone and sentiment to engage the users. In order to assess the effectiveness of the dialogue, 15 female participants were recruited to partake in the study, assessing their overall experience with the purpose of gaining feedback and refining the chatbot. Participants were asked to complete 5 tasks and the majority completed 95% of the tasks successfully, resulting in an overall positive user experience. The participants communicated with and received the tone of the dialogues very well from AishaBot. Along with this, a better understanding was gained on how to alter key words and how the participants from different age ranges went about asking their questions.

The growth in online job boards has made it easier than ever to find and apply for roles online. Unfortunately, since said job boards are, mainly, designed for hiring companies and not job applicants, the applicant interface is high friction and frustrating. With each company (and often each job) that a job-seeker applies for, they need to fill out an application form asking for the same information they have already provided countless times. This thesis explores the effectiveness of FuseApply, a web application and accompanying Chrome extension that reduces the friction involved in filling out these forms by automatically filling out a portion of job applications for users. Results from user experience testing with eleven Arizona State University (ASU) School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence students on real-world job applications demonstrated significant time savings and thus added value for users. On average, FuseApply saved users 33.09 seconds in time completing online job application forms, compared with manually filling them out. A one-tail T-test confirmed that this difference is statistically significant. Users also showed noticeable reduction in frustration with FuseApply. 72.7% of applicants said that they would use FuseApply in the future when applying for jobs, and comments were also positive. Business viability is less clear, as 63.6% of applicants said they would not pay for the software. Results demonstrate that FuseApply is useful and valuable software, but cast doubt on monetization plans.