Support for context-aware intelligibility and control

ABSTRACT

Intelligibility and control are important user concerns in context-aware applications. They allow a user to understand why an application is behaving a certain way, and to change its behavior. Because of their importance to end users, they must be addressed at an interface level. However, often the sensors or machine learning systems that users need to understand and control are created long before a specific application is built, or created separately from the application interface. Thus, supporting interface designers in building intelligibility and control into interfaces requires application logic and underlying infrastructure to be exposed in some structured fashion. As context-aware infrastructures do not provide generalized support for this, we extended one such infrastructure with Situations, components that appropriately exposes application logic, and supports debugging and simple intelligibility and control interfaces, while making it easier for an application developer to build context-aware applications and facilitating designer access to application state and behavior. We developed support for interface designers in Visual Basic and Flash. We demonstrate the usefulness of this support through an evaluation of programmers, an evaluation of the usability of the new infrastructure with interface designers, and the augmentation of three common context-aware applications.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
context-aware computing, control, design support, intelligibility, toolkits