Better User Interfaces for Occasionally Failing Systems

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Technology increasingly employs unreliable systems as a central means to interpret input. Common examples include voice and text input in mobile devices, and lane departure detection in cars. This reliance exposes a fundamental problem - people do not generally understand the underlying systems, and seemingly small system or human errors can lead to potentially disastrous consequences. While technical improvements partially address this, the proposed research program pursues a complementary approach through better understanding, theories, models of human interaction with, and new user interface (UI) technologies for, unreliable systems. The first part of the proposed program analyzes human behaviours around occasionally failing systems. I have previously studied such behaviours and will here expand my experimental work to other domains, e.g., speech recognition. Additionally, the program will gather larger data sets with crowd-sourced studies and analyze them for behavioural patterns. Previously, I identified a behavioural change due to frustration, typically around 95% reliability, in two task domains. This change and human adaptation to failures will be studied systematically for different combinations of task domain, task criticality, user, and context. Building on insights gained, the second objective looks at new UI mechanisms to alleviate the effects of unreliable automation, e.g., by avoiding repeated wrong predictions, reducing user frustration. Other work will investigate novel solutions that automatically identify failures by looking for instances with both low prediction confidence and high correction, e.g., in eye tracking. Users will then be encouraged to switch to a different UI modality or apply other fixes. Another thread will investigate if sensing technologies, e.g., EEG, can trigger better system responses to failures, by offering different predictions/reactions. Complementing the second objective, the third one focuses on informing technical improvements. User corrections express valuable information about incidents where the underlying technologies are not working well enough. I will devise different ways to communicate such instances and resultant user corrections to system developers in appropriately anonymized ways. The originality of the proposed research stems from its integrative approach for iteratively developing UIs for imperfect systems, including new mechanisms to reduce or prevent failure reoccurrence. The collected data will enable us to better understand the trade-offs humans make around imperfect systems, and guide theory, model and system development. The results are expected to improve UIs for many applications, used by millions of people every day. Thus, even seemingly small improvements will have significant impact. Together the work will yield better UIs and a better understanding of, and theories for, human behaviours around imperfect systems, while simultaneously informing system improvement.