These notes are summary of concepts presented in “Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context Aware Systems.”
Victoria Bellotti and Keith Edwards. 2001. Intelligibility and accountability: human considerations in context-aware systems. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 16, 2 (December 2001), 193–212. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_05
- Component-Based Frameworks for Intelligent Systems
- Separation of action-taking applications from sensing and inferencing architecture
- Challenges in providing visibility and control in component-based approaches
- Difficulty in representing human and social contexts deterministically
- Challenges in Handling Improvisation
- Contingent and non-deterministic nature of human interactions (Suchman, 1987)
- Poor user adherence to updating system representations of their state (Bellotti & Sellen, 1993)
- Devices can handle only basic, well-defined contextual aspects autonomously
- Complexity of Engineering Context-Aware Systems
- Greater unpredictability increases sensing and system complexity
- Difficulty in predefining outcomes for highly variable conditions
- Example: Air conditioning systems unable to autonomously determine user preferences
- User Involvement in Action Outcomes
- Importance of user understanding of system actions and reasoning
- Systems should involve users to ensure acceptability of outcomes
- Intelligibility: Systems must explain their knowledge, methods, and actions
- Accountability: Systems must enforce user accountability for actions impacting others
- Principles for Intelligibility and Accountability
- Inform users of system capabilities and current context understandings
- Feedback mechanisms
- Feedforward: Indicate potential outcomes of user actions
- Confirmation: Communicate ongoing or completed actions
- Identity and action disclosure, especially for restricted information sharing
- Provide user control over system and other user actions impacting them
- Contextual Awareness and Social Rules
- Context-aware systems must consider human-salient details
- Presence, identity, arrival, departure, status, and activity
- Social rules and technical implementations governing interactions.
- Need for explicit cues about technically enabled contexts (Goffman, 1959)
- Systems must alert participants when sessions commence and provide adjustment options
- Context-aware systems must consider human-salient details
- Feedback Types for User Interaction
- Feedforward: Visual aids like flashing cursors, resizing indicators
- In-process feedback: Progress indicators (e.g., hourglass icons)
- Confirmation: Displays confirming actions or changes
- Information Capture, Construction, and Accessibility
- Users need transparency about
- Captured information and its use
- System’s interpretation, storage, and sharing of data
- Persistence and access to their information by others
- Enforce mechanisms for identity and action disclosure
- Users need transparency about
- Minimizing Human Effort Through Effective Control
- Match control strategies to uncertainty levels
- Slight doubt: Allow users to correct system actions
- Significant doubt: Enable users to confirm intended actions
- High uncertainty: Offer users explicit choices for actions
- Effective control ensures users achieve desired outcomes with minimal effort
- Match control strategies to uncertainty levels
- Designing for Rich Representations of Context
- Avoid over-reliance on simplistic representations and machine interpretations
- Support fluid, multi-layered representations capturing the nuances of situations
- Ensure design strategies accommodate the dynamic and layered nature of human contexts