Modeling and intelligibility in ambient environments

Abstract

The field of ambient environments and ubiquitous computing has matured greatly over the past 20 years. We are no longer building toy applications but are focusing on real applications that have real impacts on user. We must now consider usability concerns when designing these applications, and particularly support for intelligibility, or the ability of applications to explain their behavior. This paper discusses the importance of intelligibility, particularly for applications that model human activity, and describe work my group has conducted in understanding how users understand these applications and toolkit support for intelligibility.