Designing a Communication Bridge between Communities: Participatory Design for a Question-Answering AI Agent
This addresses communication barriers between specific user communities in workforce training, but it is incremental in applying participatory design to a narrow domain.
The paper tackled the problem of designing an AI system to bridge communication between employers and training providers with different mental models, using participatory design to develop AskJill, a question-answering agent that helps users build training proposals and includes glossary assistance as a key feature.
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.