Design Implications for Explanations: A Case Study on Supporting Reflective Assessment of Potentially Misleading Videos.

Online videos have become a prevalent means for people to acquire information. Videos, however, are often polarized, misleading, or contain topics on which people have different, contradictory views. In this work, we introduce natural language explanations to stimulate more deliberate reasoning about videos and raise users' awareness of potentially deceiving or biased information. With these explanations, we aim to support users in actively deciding and reflecting on the usefulness of the videos. We generate the explanations through an end-to-end pipeline that extracts reflection triggers so users receive additional information to the video based on its source, covered topics, communicated emotions, and sentiment. In a between-subjects user study, we examine the effect of showing the explanations for videos on three controversial topics. Besides, we assess the users' alignment with the video's message and how strong their belief is about the topic. Our results indicate that respondents' alignment with the video's message is critical to evaluate the video's usefulness. Overall, the explanations were found to be useful and of high quality. While the explanations do not influence the perceived usefulness of the videos compared to only seeing the video, people with an extreme negative alignment with a video's message perceived it as less useful (with or without explanations) and felt more confident in their assessment. We relate our findings to cognitive dissonance since users seem to be less receptive to explanations when the video's message strongly challenges their beliefs. Given these findings, we provide a set of design implications for explanations grounded in theories on reducing cognitive dissonance in light of raising awareness about online deception.

On the merits and pitfalls of introducing a digital platform to aid conservation management: Volunteer data submission and the mediating role of volunteer coordinators.

Against a backdrop of accelerating digital innovation in nature conservation and environmental management, a real-world experiment was conducted with the research aims of assessing: 1) the effects of introducing a digital data-entry platform on volunteer data submission; and 2) the extent to which coordinators influence digital platform use by their volunteers. We focussed on a large-scale volunteer-based initiative aimed at eradicating the non-native American mink (Neovison vison) from northern Scotland. This geographically dispersed conservation initiative adopted a digital platform that allowed volunteers to submit records to a central database. We found that the platform had a direct and positive effect on volunteer data submission behaviour, increasing both the number and frequency of submissions. However, our analysis revealed striking differences in coordinator engagement with the platform, which in turn influenced the engagement of volunteers with this centrally introduced digital innovation. As a consequence, the intended organisation-wide rolling out of a digital platform translated into a diversely-implemented innovation, limiting the efficacy of the tool and revealing key challenges for digital innovation in geographically-dispersed conservation initiatives.

A methodology for creating and validating psychological stories for conveying and measuring psychological traits.

Personality impacts all areas of our lives; it governs who we are and how we react to life's challenges. Personalized systems that adapt to end users should take into account the user's personality to perform well. Several methodologies (e.g. User-as-Wizard, indirect studies) that use personality adaptation require first for personality to be conveyed to the participant; this has few validated approaches. Furthermore, measuring personality is often time consuming, prone to response bias (e.g. using questionnaires) or data intensive (e.g. using behaviour or text mining). This paper presents a methodology for creating and validating stories to convey psychological traits and for using such stories with a personality slider scale to measure these traits. We present the validation of the scale and evaluate its reliability. To evidence the validity of the methodology, we outline studies where the stories and scale have been effectively applied (in recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems, and persuasive systems).

Effects of Individual Differences in Working Memory on Plan Presentational Choices.

This paper addresses research questions that are central to the area of visualization interfaces for decision support: (RQ1) whether individual user differences in working memory should be considered when choosing how to present visualizations; (RQ2) how to present the visualization to support effective decision making and processing; and (RQ3) how to evaluate the effectiveness of presentational choices. These questions are addressed in the context of presenting plans, or sequences of actions, to users. The experiments are conducted in several domains, and the findings are relevant to applications such as semi-autonomous systems in logistics. That is, scenarios that require the attention of humans who are likely to be interrupted, and require good performance but are not time critical. Following a literature review of different types of individual differences in users that have been found to affect the effectiveness of presentational choices, we consider specifically the influence of individuals' working memory (RQ1). The review also considers metrics used to evaluate presentational choices, and types of presentational choices considered. As for presentational choices (RQ2), we consider a number of variants including interactivity, aggregation, layout, and emphasis. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of plan presentational choices (RQ3) we adopt a layered-evaluation approach and measure performance in a dual task paradigm, involving both task interleaving and evaluation of situational awareness. This novel methodology for evaluating visualizations is employed in a series of experiments investigating presentational choices for a plan. A key finding is that emphasizing steps (by highlighting borders) can improve effectiveness on a primary task, but only when controlling for individual variation in working memory.