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Nađa Terzimehić, Mohamed Khamis, Florian Bemmann, Heinrich Hussmann
Lunchocracy: Improving Eating Dynamics in the Workplace Using a Bot-Based Anonymous Voting System
In CHI '18 EA: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2018) (bib)

Previous studies have shown that when individuals join groups for lunch, they tend to conform to the decision of the group. As result, people do not always have the chance to pick the food they wish for, which in turn may have negative consequences, such as not abiding to healthy diets. To address this problem, we created Lunchocracy, an anonymous decision support tool for lunch spots in a workplace based on feedback from a focus group with 7 participants. The tool implements a conversational skype-bot, Lunchbot, that allows users to express interest in joining lunch and to vote for diners to eat at. We deployed the tool for four weeks with 14 participants from the same university department. Post-interviews with 5 participants revealed an overall satisfaction with Lunchocracy, in particular due to it structuring the lunch decision-making and saving time. We discuss how the use of Lunchocracy can positively influence the groupâs eating dynamics