Despite growing awareness of ethical challenges in software development, practitioners still lack structured tools that help them critically engage with the lived experiences of marginalized users. This paper presents PerspectiveCoach, a large language model (LLM)-powered conversational tool designed to guide developers through structured perspective-taking exercises and deepen critical reflection on how software design decisions affect marginalized communities. Through a controlled study with 18 front-end developers (balanced by sex), who interacted with the tool using a real case of online gender-based harassment, we examine how PerspectiveCoach supports ethical reasoning and engagement with user perspectives. Qualitative analysis revealed increased self-awareness, broadened perspectives, and more nuanced ethical articulation, while a complementary human-human study contextualized these findings. Text similarity analyses demonstrated that participants in the human-PerspectiveCoach study improved the fidelity of their restatements over multiple attempts, capturing both surface-level and semantic aspects of user concerns. However, human-PerspectiveCoach's restatements had a lower baseline than the human-human conversations, highlighting contextual differences in impersonal and interpersonal perspective-taking. Across the study, participants rated the tool highly for usability and relevance. This work contributes an exploratory design for LLM-powered end-user perspective-taking that supports critical, ethical self-reflection and offers empirical insights (i.e., enhancing adaptivity, centering plurality) into how such tools can help practitioners build more inclusive and socially responsive technologies.

翻译：尽管软件开发的伦理挑战日益受到关注，但从业者仍缺乏结构化工具来帮助他们批判性地参与边缘化用户的真实体验。本文提出PerspectiveCoach，一种基于大型语言模型（LLM）的对话工具，旨在通过结构化视角转换练习引导开发者，并深化对软件设计决策如何影响边缘化群体的批判性反思。通过对18名前端开发者（按性别平衡）的对照研究——参与者使用在线性别骚扰的真实案例与工具交互，我们考察了PerspectiveCoach如何支持伦理推理和用户视角的参与。定性分析显示，参与者的自我意识有所提升、视角得以拓宽、伦理表述更加细致入微，而一项补充性的人-人研究为这些发现提供了情境参照。文本相似性分析表明，在人-PerspectiveCoach研究中，参与者通过多次尝试提升了重述的准确性，既捕捉了用户关切的表层特征，也把握了其语义内涵。然而，人-PerspectiveCoach对话的重述基线水平低于人-人对话，这突显了非人际与人际视角转换的情境差异。在整个研究中，参与者对工具的可用性和相关性给予高度评价。本工作贡献了一种支持批判性伦理自我反思的LLM驱动终端用户视角转换探索性设计，并为此类工具如何帮助从业者构建更具包容性和社会响应性的技术提供了实证见解（例如增强适应性、聚焦多元性）。