Investigating intelligibility for uncertain context-aware applications

Abstract

Context-aware applications use sensing and inference to attempt to determine users' contexts, and take appropriate action. However, they are prone to uncertainty, and this may compromise the trust users have in them. Providing intelligibility has been proposed to help explain to users how context-aware applications work in order to improve user impressions of them. However, we hypothesize that intelligibility may actually be harmful for applications that are very uncertain of their actions. We conducted a large controlled study of a location-aware and a sound-aware application, investigating the impact of intelligibility on understanding, and user impression of applications with varying certainty. We found that intelligibility impacts user impressions, depending on the application's certainty and behavior appropriateness. Intelligibility is helpful for applications with high certainty, but it is harmful if applications behave appropriately, yet display low certainty.