Simulating Stakeholders: Design Students' Acceptance of and Empathy Towards LLM-Based Roleplay for Design Interview Education

Abstract

The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots allows engineering, and design programs specifically, to simulate interactions with humans at low cost, but little research has been done on students' acceptance of and perceived empathic connection to AI chatbots. This paper conducts a user study to evaluate aforementioned aspects when practicing design interviews with students from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty at Delft University of Technology. Nine participants completed an exercise involving interviewing an AI persona and answered a questionnaire that adapted subscales from UTAUT2, COLLES, and EMPA-D. The students rated the chatbot consistently positive on ease of use and judged it moderately useful and professionally relevant, though opinions on its usefulness and their intention to keep using it varied widely. Self-reported empathy toward the persona was high on perspective-taking and self-awareness but lower and more variable on shared personal experience. These exploratory findings suggest that similar chatbots can provide accessible, low-stakes practice that engages students' empathic perspective-taking, while adoption and affective connection with a dissimilar persona remain open challenges. For educators in design programs, AI chatbots appear viable for low-stakes interview training, yet careful persona design and strategies for sustained engagement are needed before broader adoption.