PerspectiveCoach: Exploring LLMs for Developer Reflection

TL;DR

This paper introduces PerspectiveCoach, an LLM-powered tool that guides developers in ethical reflection and perspective-taking regarding marginalized users, supported by empirical studies showing increased awareness and nuanced understanding.

Contribution

It presents a novel LLM-based conversational tool for developer ethical reflection, with empirical evidence of its effectiveness in enhancing perspective-taking and self-awareness.

Findings

Participants showed increased self-awareness and ethical articulation.

Text similarity analyses indicated improved fidelity in restatements.

Participants rated the tool highly for usability and relevance.

Abstract

Despite growing awareness of ethical challenges in software development, practitioners still lack structured tools that help them critically engage with the lived experiences of marginalized users. This paper presents PerspectiveCoach, a large language model (LLM)-powered conversational tool designed to guide developers through structured perspective-taking exercises and deepen critical reflection on how software design decisions affect marginalized communities. Through a controlled study with 18 front-end developers (balanced by sex), who interacted with the tool using a real case of online gender-based harassment, we examine how PerspectiveCoach supports ethical reasoning and engagement with user perspectives. Qualitative analysis revealed increased self-awareness, broadened perspectives, and more nuanced ethical articulation, while a complementary human-human study contextualized these findings. Text similarity analyses demonstrated that participants in the human-PerspectiveCoach study improved the fidelity of their restatements over multiple attempts, capturing both surface-level and semantic aspects of user concerns. However, human-PerspectiveCoach's restatements had a lower baseline than the human-human conversations, highlighting contextual differences in impersonal and interpersonal perspective-taking. Across the study, participants rated the tool highly for usability and relevance. This work contributes an exploratory design for LLM-powered end-user perspective-taking that supports critical, ethical self-reflection and offers empirical insights (i.e., enhancing adaptivity, centering plurality) into how such tools can help practitioners build more inclusive and socially responsive technologies.