  How do we design an AI system that is intended to act as a communication
bridge between two user communities with different mental models and
vocabularies? Skillsync is an interactive environment that engages employers
(companies) and training providers (colleges) in a sustained dialogue to help
them achieve the goal of building a training proposal that successfully meets
the needs of the employers and employees. We used a variation of participatory
design to elicit requirements for developing AskJill, a question-answering
agent that explains how Skillsync works and thus acts as a communication bridge
between company and college users. Our study finds that participatory design
was useful in guiding the requirements gathering and eliciting user questions
for the development of AskJill. Our results also suggest that the two Skillsync
user communities perceived glossary assistance as a key feature that AskJill
needs to offer, and they would benefit from such a shared vocabulary.
