Designing Automated Facilitation for Design Thinking: A Chatbot for Supporting Teams in the Empathy Map Method

Abstract

The Empathy Map Method (EMM) in the Design Thinking approach is a powerful tool for user centered design but relies on the methodological skills and experience of rare facilitation experts to guide the team. In a collaboration engineering effort, we aim to make this expertise available to teams without constant access to a professional facilitator by packaging facilitation knowledge into structured process support and stateof-the art technology. Based on requirements from scientific and practitioners' literature, we introduce the concept of a conversational agent in the form of a chatbot to take over the role of the facilitator of the EMM. We present an initial wizard of oz evaluation to derive insights and implications for improvements and the software implementation towards the ambitious goal of automated, non-human facilitation of EMM.

Trends & Methods in Chatbot Evaluation

“…x -- [17] 2016 --x [20] 2016 --x [50] 2016 -x - [34] 2016 x -- [2] 2016 -x x [78] 2016 x -x [58] 2016 --x [6] 2016 --x [22] 2017 -x x [77] 2017 x x - [39] 2017 x x - [60] 2017 x -- [21] 2017 -x - [63] 2017 x -- [76] 2017 x -- [54] 2017 x -- [79] 2017 --x [28] 2017 -x - [53] 2017 -x - [49] 2018 -x x [67] 2018 --x [51] 2018 -x x [52] 2018 x -- [59] 2018 -x x [44] 2018 -x x [42] 2018 -x x [19] 2018 -x x [71] 2018 -x x [8] 2018 -x x [35] 2018 x -- [31] 2018 -x x [72] 2018 -x x [13] 2019 -x x [41] 2019 -x - [45] 2019 x -- [11] 2019 --x [24] 2019 x x - [29] 2019 x x - [56] 2019 x -- [33] 2019 x -x [46] 2019 -x - [10] 2019 -x x [64] 2020 -x x [3] 2020 -x x [9] 2020 -x - [4] 2020 x -- [80] 2020 x x -…”

Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda

“…Adam et al 1). While dedicated workshops and conferences of relevance to chatbot research are emerging-such as CUI, 6 CONVERSATIONS, 7 and CAIR 8 -in addition to established venues-such as SIGDIAL, 9 IVA, 10 IWSDS, 11 and INTERSPEECH 12 -research findings are typically presented in a broad range of journals and conferences. Research related to chatbots is also conducted in multiple communities with varying degrees of exchange among them.…”

Digital Facilitation Assistance for Collaborative, Creative Design Processes

“…Recent empirical and design work started to address specific aspects of this question [10]. Bittner and Shoury [9] could present results, in which a chatbot performed successfully in facilitating a method within DT. This is also confirmed by previous studies, which present similar conclusions by showing DAs' potential [2,16,68].…”

“…peers), in the study at hand we focus on DAs that act as facilitators [10]. Specific DAs have been tested before as a facilitator in a virtual group brainstorming session to support and organize it [8,62] or as an automated facilitator for the Empathy Map Method in DT [9]. The used DA performed successfully in moderating the session.…”