• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.221-238
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• 2019

Recently, companies and public institutions have been actively introducing chatbot services in the field of customer counseling and response. The introduction of the chatbot service not only brings labor cost savings to companies and organizations, but also enables rapid communication with customers. Advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence are driving the growth of these chatbot services. The current chatbot can understand users' questions and offer the most appropriate answers to questions through machine learning and deep learning. The advancement of chatbot core technologies such as NLP, NLU, and NLG has made it possible to understand words, understand paragraphs, understand meanings, and understand emotions. For this reason, the value of chatbots continues to rise. However, technology-oriented chatbots can be inconsistent with what users want inherently, so chatbots need to be addressed in the area of the user experience, not just in the area of technology. The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents the importance of the User Experience as well as the advancement of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud, and IoT technologies. The development of IT technology and the importance of user experience have provided people with a variety of environments and changed lifestyles. This means that experiences in interactions with people, services(products) and the environment become very important. Therefore, it is time to develop a user needs-based services(products) that can provide new experiences and values to people. This study proposes a chatbot development process based on user needs by applying the design thinking approach, a representative methodology in the field of user experience, to chatbot development. The process proposed in this study consists of four steps. The first step is 'setting up knowledge domain' to set up the chatbot's expertise. Accumulating the information corresponding to the configured domain and deriving the insight is the second step, 'Knowledge accumulation and Insight identification'. The third step is 'Opportunity Development and Prototyping'. It is going to start full-scale development at this stage. Finally, the 'User Feedback' step is to receive feedback from users on the developed prototype. This creates a "user needs-based service (product)" that meets the process's objectives. Beginning with the fact gathering through user observation, Perform the process of abstraction to derive insights and explore opportunities. Next, it is expected to develop a chatbot that meets the user's needs through the process of materializing to structure the desired information and providing the function that fits the user's mental model. In this study, we present the actual construction examples for the domestic cosmetics market to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed process. The reason why it chose the domestic cosmetics market as its case is because it shows strong characteristics of users' experiences, so it can quickly understand responses from users. This study has a theoretical implication in that it proposed a new chatbot development process by incorporating the design thinking methodology into the chatbot development process. This research is different from the existing chatbot development research in that it focuses on user experience, not technology. It also has practical implications in that companies or institutions propose realistic methods that can be applied immediately. In particular, the process proposed in this study can be accessed and utilized by anyone, since 'user needs-based chatbots' can be developed even if they are not experts. This study suggests that further studies are needed because only one field of study was conducted. In addition to the cosmetics market, additional research should be conducted in various fields in which the user experience appears, such as the smart phone and the automotive market. Through this, it will be able to be reborn as a general process necessary for 'development of chatbots centered on user experience, not technology centered'.