Chatbot Development through Design Thinking Techniques: An Exploratory Study from Students’ Perspective
Abstract
Text-based conversational agents (chatbots) have become central interfaces in modern interactive systems, widely used in contexts ranging from customer support to educational environments, personal assistants, and healthcare systems. However, developing chatbots is a challenging process, as it requires identifying requirements and understanding users’ perspectives on these systems. In this context, Design Thinking (DT) has emerged as a promising approach for promoting creativity, empathy, and innovation in developing solutions centered on the needs of end-users. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate DT into the Software Engineering curriculum to provide students with the skills needed to develop chatbots effectively. In this sense, this paper presents an exploratory study conducted with 13 undergraduate students aiming to investigate the DT cycles, with an emphasis on techniques that promote empathy in the conception, design, and evaluation of chatbots. The study involved participants in practical immersion activities, utilizing several methods to understand the context of use and the needs of users. We collected the data through diaries and questionnaires answered by the participants. The results show that participants were able to identify latent needs, generate more empathetic and contextually relevant proposals, and engage more actively in the design process.
Keywords:
Design Thinking, Chatbots, Students’ Perspective, Software Engineering Education
References
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Tingting Liu, Salvatore Giorgi, Ankit Aich, Allison Lahnala, Brenda Curtis, Lyle Ungar, and João Sedoc. 2024. The illusion of empathy: how ai chatbots shape conversation perception. (Nov. 2024). DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2411.12877.
Sophie McKenzie and Xiao Lui. 2024. Integrating human-centric approaches into undergraduate software engineering education: a scoping review and curriculum analysis in the australian context. (2024). [link] arXiv: 2407.07322 [cs.SE].
Michael Mctear. 2017. The rise of the conversational interface: a new kid on the block? In (Oct. 2017), 38–49. isbn: 978-3-319-69364-4. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69365-1_3.
John Mendoza-Garcia and Monica E. Cardella. 2014. Using alien-centered design for teaching iteration in the design process in undergraduate design courses. In 2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Proceedings, 1–8. DOI: 10.1109/FIE.2014.7044432.
Elvis Ortega-Ochoa, Marta Arguedas, and Thanasis Daradoumis. 2024. Empathic pedagogical conversational agents: a systematic literature review. British Journal of Educational Technology, 55, 3, 886–909. eprint: [link]. DOI: 10.1111/bjet.13413.
Iverson Pereira, Ana Guimarães, Josué Nascimento, Severino Costa Neto, and Ricardo Souza. 2017. Aplicação do design thinking para educadores no desenvolvimento de uma solução inovadora. In Anais do XXIII Workshop de Informática na Escola. SBC, Recife, 422–431. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.wie.2017.422.
Angelo Ranieri, Irene Di Bernardo, and Cristina Mele. 2024. Serving customers through chatbots: positive and negative effects on customer experience. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 34, (Feb. 2024). DOI: 10.1108/JSTP-01-2023-0015.
Ita Richardson and Yvonne Delaney. 2009. Problem based learning in the software engineering classroom. In 22nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. GS Search. IEEE, 174–181.
Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson. 2012. Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right. (3rd ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional. isbn: 0321815742.
Kala S Retna. 2015. Thinking about “design thinking”: a study of teacher experiences. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 36, (Feb. 2015), 1–15. DOI: 10.1080/02188791.2015.1005049.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2024. Human factors in the design of chatbot interactions: conversational design practices. In Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC ’24) Article 44. Association for Computing Machinery, 12 pages. isbn: 9798400712241. DOI: 10.1145/3702038.3702083.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2022. Towards user-centric guidelines for chatbot conversational design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40, 2, (Sept. 2022), 98–120. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2022.2118244.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2022. Towards user-centric guidelines for chatbot conversational design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40, 2, (Sept. 2022), 98–120. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2022.2118244.
Williamson Silva, Igor Steinmacher, and Tayana Conte. 2019. Students’ and instructors’ perceptions of five different active learning strategies used to teach software modeling. IEEE Access, 7, 184063–184077.
Sofie Skov, Josefine Andersen, Sigurd Lauridsen, Mads Bab, Marianne Bundsbæk, and Maj Nielsen. 2022. Designing a conversational agent to promote teamwork and collaborative practices using design thinking: an explorative study on user experiences. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, (Oct. 2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.903715.
Sofie Skov, Josefine Andersen, Sigurd Lauridsen, Mads Bab, Marianne Bundsbæk, and Maj Nielsen. 2022. Designing a conversational agent to promote teamwork and collaborative practices using design thinking: an explorative study on user experiences. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, (Oct. 2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.903715.
Cynara Lira de Carvalho Souza. 2014. Uso do design thinking na elicitação de requisitos de ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem móvel. [link].
Natasha Valentim, Williamson Silva, and Tayana Conte. 2017. The students’ perspectives on applying design thinking for the design of mobile applications. In (May 2017). DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-SEET.2017.10.
Christophe Vetterli,Walter Brenner, Falk Uebernickel, and Charles Petrie. 2013. From palaces to yurts: why requirements engineering needs design thinking. IEEE Internet Computing, 17, 2, 91–94. DOI: 10.1109/MIC.2013.32.
Bianca Ximenes, Isadora Alves, and Cristiano Araújo. 2015. Software project management combining agile, lean startup and design thinking. In vol. 9186. (Aug. 2015), 356–367. isbn: 978-3-319-20885-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20886-2_34.
Bianca Ximenes, Isadora Alves, and Cristiano Araújo. 2015. Software project management combining agile, lean startup and design thinking. In vol. 9186. (Aug. 2015), 356–367. isbn: 978-3-319-20885-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20886-2_34.
Qing Yu, Kun Yu, and Rongri Lin. 2024. A meta-analysis of the effects of design thinking on student learning. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, 1, (June 2024), 742. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-03237-5.
Yimin Zhu, Jiemin Zhang, and Jiaming Liang. 2023. Concrete or abstract: how chatbot response styles influence customer satisfaction. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 62, 101317. DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2023.101317.
Thomas Beyhl and Holger Giese. 2015. Traceability recovery for innovation processes. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Software and Systems Traceability (SST ’15). IEEE Press, Florence, Italy, 22–28.
David Boud and Grahame I Feletti. 2013. Changing problem-based learning. In The challenge of problem-based learning. GS Search. Routledge, 9–22.
Tim Brown. 2012. Design thinking defined. [link].
Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt. 2010. Design thinking for social innovation by. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 8, (July 2010), 30–35. DOI: 10.1596/1020-797X_12_1_29.
John Castro, Silvia Acuña, and Natalia Juristo. 2008. Enriching requirements analysis with the personas technique. In (Jan. 2008).
Danielly de Paula, Kathryn Cormican, and Franziska Dobrigkeit. 2021. From acquaintances to partners in innovation: an analysis of 20 years of design thinking’s contribution to new product development. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, PP, (June 2021), 1–14. DOI: 10.1109/TEM.2021.3084884
Simone C dos Santos, Priscila BS Reis, Jacinto FS Reis, and Fabio Tavares. 2020. Two decades of pbl in teaching computing: a systematic mapping study. IEEE Transactions on Education, 64, 3, 233–244. GS Search.
Cristiane Ellwanger. 2013. Design de interação, design experiencial e design thinking: a tríade que permeia o escopo de desenvolvimento de sistemas computacionais interativos. 2013, (Jan. 2013).
Heather Fraser. 2007. The practice of breakthrough strategies by design. Journal of Business Strategy, 28, (July 2007), 66–74. DOI: 10.1108/02756660710760962.
Esra Gonen. 2019. Tim brown, change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation (2009). Markets, Globalization Development Review, 04, (Jan. 2019). DOI: 10.23860/MGDR-2019-04-02-08.
José Manuel González-Varona, Adolfo Lopez-Paredes, David Poza, and Fernando Acebes. 2021. Building and development of an organizational competence for digital transformation in smes. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 14, (Jan. 2021), 15–24. DOI: 10.3926/jiem.3279.
Kavitha Gurusamy, Narayanan Srinivasaraghavan, and Sisira Adikari. 2016. An integrated framework for design thinking and agile methods for digital transformation. In vol. 9746. (July 2016), 34–42. isbn: 978-3-319-40408-0. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40409-7_4.
Xu Han, Michelle Zhou, Matthew J. Turner, and Tom Yeh. 2021. Designing effective interview chatbots: automatic chatbot profiling and design suggestion generation for chatbot debugging. In (CHI ’21) Article 389. Association for Computing Machinery, Yokohama, Japan, 15 pages. isbn: 9781450380966. DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445569.
Isabel Kathleen Fornell Haugeland, Asbjørn Følstad, Cameron Taylor, and Cato Alexander Bjørkli. 2022. Understanding the user experience of customer service chatbots: an experimental study of chatbot interaction design. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 161, 102788. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102788.
Jennifer Hehn and Daniel Méndez. 2021. Combining design thinking and software requirements engineering to create human-centered software-intensive systems. CoRR, abs/2112.05549. [link] arXiv: 2112.05549.
2022. Combining design thinking and software requirements engineering to create human-centered software-intensive systems. (Feb. 2022), 11–60. isbn: 978-3-030-90593-4. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-90594-1_2.
Minlie Huang, Xiaoyan Zhu, and Jianfeng Gao. 2019. Challenges in building intelligent open-domain dialog systems. CoRR, abs/1905.05709. [link] arXiv: 1905.05709.
International Organization for Standardization. 2023. ISO/IEC 25010:2023 — Systems and software engineering — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — Product quality model. [link]. Edition 2, Published in November 2023. Accessed: 2025-07-31. (2023).
Jiun-Hao Jhan, Chao-Peng Liu, Shyh-Kang Jeng, and Hung-Yi Lee. 2021. Cheerbots: chatbots toward empathy and emotionusing reinforcement learning. (2021). [link] arXiv: 2110.03949 [cs.CL].
Valderrama Jonatan and Aguilar-Alonso Igor. 2023. Creation of a chatbot based on natural language proccesing for whatsapp. (2023). [link] arXiv: 2310.10675 [cs.CL].
Jeanne Liedtka. 2011. Learning to use design thinking tools for successful innovation. Strategy Leadership, 39, (Sept. 2011), 13–19. DOI: 10.1108/10878571111161480.
Lin Lin, Yuqi Dong, Xingye Chen, Rustam Shadiev, Yingying Ma, and Huilun Zhang. 2024. Exploring the impact of design thinking in information technology education: an empirical investigation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 51, 101450. DOI: 10.1016/j.tsc.2023.101450.
Tingting Liu, Salvatore Giorgi, Ankit Aich, Allison Lahnala, Brenda Curtis, Lyle Ungar, and João Sedoc. 2024. The illusion of empathy: how ai chatbots shape conversation perception. (Nov. 2024). DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2411.12877.
Sophie McKenzie and Xiao Lui. 2024. Integrating human-centric approaches into undergraduate software engineering education: a scoping review and curriculum analysis in the australian context. (2024). [link] arXiv: 2407.07322 [cs.SE].
Michael Mctear. 2017. The rise of the conversational interface: a new kid on the block? In (Oct. 2017), 38–49. isbn: 978-3-319-69364-4. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69365-1_3.
John Mendoza-Garcia and Monica E. Cardella. 2014. Using alien-centered design for teaching iteration in the design process in undergraduate design courses. In 2014 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) Proceedings, 1–8. DOI: 10.1109/FIE.2014.7044432.
Elvis Ortega-Ochoa, Marta Arguedas, and Thanasis Daradoumis. 2024. Empathic pedagogical conversational agents: a systematic literature review. British Journal of Educational Technology, 55, 3, 886–909. eprint: [link]. DOI: 10.1111/bjet.13413.
Iverson Pereira, Ana Guimarães, Josué Nascimento, Severino Costa Neto, and Ricardo Souza. 2017. Aplicação do design thinking para educadores no desenvolvimento de uma solução inovadora. In Anais do XXIII Workshop de Informática na Escola. SBC, Recife, 422–431. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.wie.2017.422.
Angelo Ranieri, Irene Di Bernardo, and Cristina Mele. 2024. Serving customers through chatbots: positive and negative effects on customer experience. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 34, (Feb. 2024). DOI: 10.1108/JSTP-01-2023-0015.
Ita Richardson and Yvonne Delaney. 2009. Problem based learning in the software engineering classroom. In 22nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. GS Search. IEEE, 174–181.
Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson. 2012. Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right. (3rd ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional. isbn: 0321815742.
Kala S Retna. 2015. Thinking about “design thinking”: a study of teacher experiences. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 36, (Feb. 2015), 1–15. DOI: 10.1080/02188791.2015.1005049.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2024. Human factors in the design of chatbot interactions: conversational design practices. In Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC ’24) Article 44. Association for Computing Machinery, 12 pages. isbn: 9798400712241. DOI: 10.1145/3702038.3702083.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2022. Towards user-centric guidelines for chatbot conversational design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40, 2, (Sept. 2022), 98–120. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2022.2118244.
Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva and Edna Dias Canedo. 2022. Towards user-centric guidelines for chatbot conversational design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40, 2, (Sept. 2022), 98–120. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2022.2118244.
Williamson Silva, Igor Steinmacher, and Tayana Conte. 2019. Students’ and instructors’ perceptions of five different active learning strategies used to teach software modeling. IEEE Access, 7, 184063–184077.
Sofie Skov, Josefine Andersen, Sigurd Lauridsen, Mads Bab, Marianne Bundsbæk, and Maj Nielsen. 2022. Designing a conversational agent to promote teamwork and collaborative practices using design thinking: an explorative study on user experiences. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, (Oct. 2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.903715.
Sofie Skov, Josefine Andersen, Sigurd Lauridsen, Mads Bab, Marianne Bundsbæk, and Maj Nielsen. 2022. Designing a conversational agent to promote teamwork and collaborative practices using design thinking: an explorative study on user experiences. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, (Oct. 2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.903715.
Cynara Lira de Carvalho Souza. 2014. Uso do design thinking na elicitação de requisitos de ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem móvel. [link].
Natasha Valentim, Williamson Silva, and Tayana Conte. 2017. The students’ perspectives on applying design thinking for the design of mobile applications. In (May 2017). DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-SEET.2017.10.
Christophe Vetterli,Walter Brenner, Falk Uebernickel, and Charles Petrie. 2013. From palaces to yurts: why requirements engineering needs design thinking. IEEE Internet Computing, 17, 2, 91–94. DOI: 10.1109/MIC.2013.32.
Bianca Ximenes, Isadora Alves, and Cristiano Araújo. 2015. Software project management combining agile, lean startup and design thinking. In vol. 9186. (Aug. 2015), 356–367. isbn: 978-3-319-20885-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20886-2_34.
Bianca Ximenes, Isadora Alves, and Cristiano Araújo. 2015. Software project management combining agile, lean startup and design thinking. In vol. 9186. (Aug. 2015), 356–367. isbn: 978-3-319-20885-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20886-2_34.
Qing Yu, Kun Yu, and Rongri Lin. 2024. A meta-analysis of the effects of design thinking on student learning. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, 1, (June 2024), 742. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-03237-5.
Yimin Zhu, Jiemin Zhang, and Jiaming Liang. 2023. Concrete or abstract: how chatbot response styles influence customer satisfaction. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 62, 101317. DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2023.101317.
Published
2025-11-04
How to Cite
VILLA, João Emilio Antonio; VILELA, Ricardo Ferreira; VALLE, Pedro Henrique; SILVA, Williamson.
Chatbot Development through Design Thinking Techniques: An Exploratory Study from Students’ Perspective. In: BRAZILIAN SOFTWARE QUALITY SYMPOSIUM (SBQS), 24. , 2025, São José dos Campos/SP.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 497-507.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbqs.2025.15245.
