Enhanced engineering design behaviour using chatbots with user experience

In recent years, both industrialists and scholars have come to believe that involving users in the design process is the basis for ensuring design innovation and successful product development. However, practical restrictions of time, budget, and location may inhibit users’ long-term participation at teaching sites. With the development of emergent chatbot technology, the aim of this study is to investigate the feasibility that students practice interacting with chatbots who incorporate multiple real-life users’ experiences with products and product-specific knowledge in the classroom for exempting from time and accessibility constraints. We conducted an experiment using a design workshop to compare the student groups with respect to their interactions with chatbots, with target customers, and with no users while they generated design concepts. The quality of the three student groups’ design concepts and the differences of their design behaviours were compared. The outcomes of this study indicate that the chatbot group exhibited more significant transitions of engineering design behaviours and better design concept score than that the target-user and no-user group did. Chatbots incorporate user experience may provide students with opportunities to practice extracting information from users with the aim of promoting the success of the design process.