Conversational agents stand to play an important role in supporting behavior change and well-being in many domains. With users able to interact with conversational agents through both text and voice, understanding how designing for these channels supports behavior change is important. To begin answering this question, we designed a conversational agent for the workplace that supports workers' activity journaling and self-learning through reflection. Our agent, named Robota, combines chat-based communication as a Slack Bot and voice interaction through a personal device using a custom Amazon Alexa Skill. Through a 3-week controlled deployment, we examine how voice-based and chat-based interaction affect workers' reflection and support self-learning. We demonstrate that, while many current technical limitations exist, adding dedicated mobile voice interaction separate from the already busy chat modality may further enable users to step back and reflect on their work. We conclude with discussion of the implications of our findings to design of workplace self-tracking systems specifically and to behavior-change systems in general.

Effective communication of activities and progress in the workplace is crucial for the success of many modern organizations. In this paper, we extend current research on workplace communication and uncover opportunities for technology to support effective work activity reporting. We report on three studies: With a survey of 68 knowledge workers followed by 14 in-depth interviews, we investigated the perceived benefits of different types of progress reports and an array of challenges at three stages: Collection, Composition, and Delivery. We show an important interplay between written and face-to-face reporting, and highlight the importance of tailoring a report to its audience. We then present results from an analysis of 722 reports composed by 361 U.S.-based knowledge workers, looking at the influence of the audience on a report's language. We conclude by discussing opportunities for future technologies to assist both employees and managers in collecting, interpreting, and reporting progress in the workplace.

We present a photo co-creation activity, called "Stitched Groupies," in a photo-taking and sharing platform deployed inside IBM. "Stitched Groupies" allow employees to take and combine photos with peers asynchronously across physical boundaries. In a 25-day exploratory field study with 50 users taking 68 half-photos (of which 52 were completed by others), we categorized themes such as Spliced Faces, Composed Scenes, Body Modifications, Inanimate Objects and Doppelgangers. Our results suggest that photo co-creation can stimulate playfulness and fun in the workplace.

With new technological advances more and more the boundaries of online and offline spaces is becoming fuzzy. This hybrid model of computer-mediated communication introduces new challenges and opportunities for users, researchers, and practitioners. My dissertation research focuses particularly of designing processes and tools to better support newcomers within online communities with hybrid communication patterns. My dissertation will contribute to research and practices of building "newcomer-friendly" hybrid communities.