LadderTeam: Dual-Agent Laddering Elicitation Framework

📅 2026-08-17
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决软件需求收集中的效率与质量难题,提出LadderTeam框架,利用双代理大语言模型自动化用户体验线框图访谈,有效提高反馈的详细度和可执行性。
📝 Abstract
Eliciting detailed and actionable software requirements from end-users is a critical phase in the iterative development of a software product or application. To ensure the feedback collected is detailed and actionable, software teams can leverage the laddering interview technique. While effective for ensuring granular and actionable items from the software feedback, these interviews are subject to several limitations. They are traditionally a manual process associated with a time and financial burden, limiting scalability; interviewers must balance probing for depth while managing interviewee behavioral and cultural constraints. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{LadderTeam}, an open, reproducible framework that automates UX wireframe interviews using a dual-agent Large Language Model (LLM) architecture. An active interviewer agent executes one of three probing strategies (ACV, 5-Whys, and JTBD) to elicit actionable software requirements from usability feedback comments, while a concurrent background Judge agent evaluates probe-response pairs and triggers real-time guardrails to prevent topic drift. To rigorously evaluate LLM laddering without participant variance confounds, we introduce a controlled simulation methodology utilizing scripted ground-truth transcripts to isolate probe quality as the sole experimental variable. Across 216 interviews, \textbf{LadderTeam} achieved 99.1\% chain convergence and an 81.0\% ground-truth actionable response match (86.1\% reluctant personality, 75.9\% terse personality) with zero drift across all runs. All evaluation code, all transcripts, inputs, and a live demonstration platform will be open-sourced upon acceptance.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

software requirements
laddering interview
scalability
cultural constraints
actionable feedback
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Dual-Agent LLM Architecture
Automated UX Wireframe Interviews
Controlled Simulation Methodology
M
Manjushree Aithal
University of Colorado Anschutz
A
Alexander Kotz
University of Colorado Anschutz
J
James Mitchell
University of Colorado Anschutz