Putting user requirements in the center of the software development process is a crucial success factor. However, effective techniques for user involvement in early development stages, mostly interviews or focus groups, are costly, time-consuming, training-intensive, and location-bound. These challenges make these traditional techniques a questionable fit for the numerous, heterogeneous, and geographically distributed user groups of today. By leveraging AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), new opportunities exist to address these challenges. Using AI technologies, new solutions to enable the involvement of a wide audience of users and to make sense of their input in a scalable way become available. In this talk, I will present recent research results of my research group at KIT, focusing on two mutually reinforcing AI-based approaches to perform automated user interviews and support scalable analysis of the collected interview data. First, chatbots, text-based conversational agents powered by AI technology, have seen rising interest over the last years. Chatbots have the potential to assist with user interviewing, as they can be used in various contexts, scale very well, and allow to precisely control the interview structure. Specifically, I will present LadderBot, a system that mimics human interviewer’s questioning techniques and enables end-users to articulate needs and requirements on the grounds of the laddering method. Second, support is required to allow the scalable analysis of the large amounts of collected interview data. In my talk, I will present Cody, an interactive labeling system using NLP and machine learning techniques that support the analysis of interview data and the extraction of user requirements.  

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Alexander Maedche is a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He heads the research group “Information Systems & Service Design” (ISSD, http://issd.iism.kit.edu/) at the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing (IISM). He is Dean of Studies of the B.Sc./M.Sc. program “Information Systems“ and Program Director of the M.Sc. program“ Information Systems Engineering & Management“ at Hector Technology Business School. Alexander Maedche received a Diploma degree in industrial engineering & management in 1999 and a PhD in applied computer science in 2001 from the University of Karlsruhe. Before joining KIT, he was a professor at the University of Mannheim in between 2009 and 2015. In the time frame of 2003-2009, he has worked in industry at Bosch and SAP in managerial positions in the fields of corporate IT management (business intelligence competence center) and enterprise software product development (user experience/UI technologies). His research work is positioned at the intersection of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Specifically, he investigates the lifecycle of information systems from a user-centered point of view and the design of interactive intelligent systems for enterprises and the society.