Designing a Communication Bridge between Communities: Participatory Design for a Question-Answering AI Agent

TL;DR

This paper presents the design of AskJill, a question-answering AI agent developed through participatory design to facilitate communication between employers and training providers with different vocabularies.

Contribution

It introduces a participatory design approach to develop a communication bridge AI that addresses community-specific vocabularies and requirements.

Findings

Participatory design effectively guided requirements gathering.

Users identified glossary assistance as a key feature.

Shared vocabulary benefits both communities.

Abstract

How do we design an AI system that is intended to act as a communication bridge between two user communities with different mental models and vocabularies? Skillsync is an interactive environment that engages employers (companies) and training providers (colleges) in a sustained dialogue to help them achieve the goal of building a training proposal that successfully meets the needs of the employers and employees. We used a variation of participatory design to elicit requirements for developing AskJill, a question-answering agent that explains how Skillsync works and thus acts as a communication bridge between company and college users. Our study finds that participatory design was useful in guiding the requirements gathering and eliciting user questions for the development of AskJill. Our results also suggest that the two Skillsync user communities perceived glossary assistance as a key feature that AskJill needs to offer, and they would benefit from such a shared vocabulary.