More and more people use virtual assistants in their everyday life (e.g., on their mobile phones, in their homes, or in their cars). So-called vehicle assistance systems have evolved over the years and now perform various proactive tasks. However, we still lack concrete guidelines with all the specifics that one needs to consider to build virtual assistants that provide a convincing user experience (especially in vehicles). This research provides guidelines for designing virtual in- vehicle assistants. The developed guidelines offer a clear and structured overview of what designers have to consider while designing virtual in-vehicle assistants for a convincing user experience. Following design science research principles, we designed the guidelines based on the existing literature on the requirements of assistant systems and on the results from interviewing experts. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the guidelines, we developed a virtual reality prototype that considered the design guidelines. In a user experience test with 19 participants, we found that the prototype was easy to use, allowed good interaction, and increased the users’ overall comfort.

Conversational agents like virtual assistants or chatbots are getting more and more attention within research and practice due to a significant technological progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This interdisciplinary field of research led to a variety of different terms, approaches, frameworks, guidelines and views, that in consequence challenges organizations and researchers to systematically understand, design and implement AI-based applications like conversational agents. Moreover, use- cases in which conversational agents do not just assist their user, but rather collaborate with them, will be interesting in the future. We therefore propose the collaborative agent, an evolution of the conversa- tional agent and introduce the Virtual Companion (VC), an exemplary class of the collaborative agent. As profound design theories and tool support for the design of AI is missing, we introduce the Virtual Companion Canvas (VCC), an approach towards a design theory and a tool to analyze, understand and design VCs, detached from concrete technology. The VCC evolved within a comprehensive Design Sci- ence Research project, with currently two contributing design projects containing three design cycles and two successive iterations of the VCC itself. This research paper introduces the concept of the col- laborative agent and reports the development of the VCC as well as the results of a conducted experiment.