Abstract-Research is emerging on how end users can correct mistakes their intelligent agents make, but before users can correctly "debug" an intelligent agent, they need some degree of understanding of how it works. In this paper we consider ways intelligent agents should explain themselves to end users, especially focusing on how the soundness and completeness of the explanations impacts the fidelity of end users' mental models. Our findings suggest that completeness is more important than soundness: increasing completeness via certain information types helped participants' mental models and, surprisingly, their perception of the cost/benefit tradeoff of attending to the explanations. We also found that oversimplification, as per many commercial agents, can be a problem: when soundness was very low, participants experienced more mental demand and lost trust in the explanations, thereby reducing the likelihood that users will pay attention to such explanations at all.

Abstract

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users' problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitionerssuch as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers-can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a genderinclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software-without needing any background in gender research-were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone. Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.5.2. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): User Interfaces; H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Additional KeywordsGender; gender HCI; diversity; problem-solving software; GenderMag Research Highlights We discuss five facets of prior gender research with ties to males' and females' usage of problem-solving software.  We present GenderMag, the first systematic method to evaluate gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software.  We show how GenderMag draws upon and encapsulates these five facets.  We present three qualitative empirical studies that were used to inform and to validate various aspects of GenderMag, and show the kinds of issues that participants found and how gender of the evaluator interacted with usage of the method.

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Becauseof intense collaborative needs, requirements engineering is a challenge in global software development. How do distributed teams manage the development of requirements in environments that require significant cross-site collaboration and coordination? In this paper, we report research that used social network analysis to explore collaboration and awareness among team members during requirements management in an industrial distributed software team. Using the lens of a requirements-centred social network to group team members who work on a particular requirement, we collected data to characterize requirements-centric collaborations in a project, and to examine aspects of awareness of requirements changes within these networks.Our findings indicate organic patterns of collaboration involving considerable cross-site interaction, in which communication of changes was the most predominant reason for interaction. Although we did not find evidence that distance affects developers' awareness of remote team members who work on the same requirements, distance affected how accessible the remote colleagues were. We discuss implications for knowledge sharing and coordination of work on a requirement in distributed teams, and propose directions for the design of collaboration tools that support awareness in distributed requirements management.