While digital inclusivity researchers and software practitioners have been trying to address exclusion biases in Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers (WIMP) user interfaces (UIs) for a long time, little has been done to investigate if and how inclusive software design and its methods that have been devised for WIMP UIs...
Exception handling is a general purpose tool found in many modern programming language, but most work to date is based on textual languages. We present an approach to exception handling in a new context, the visual programming language Forms/3. The visual nature of Forms/3 supports an effective approach to exception...
"What’s wrong with this AI?" Explainable AI (XAI) researchers are moving beyond explaining an AI’s actions, to helping users detect an AI’s failures. However this detection may not be enough—for actionability, we often need to pinpoint which part failed. We investigate how AAR/AI, a structured assessment process, supports users with...
How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this thesis introduces InclusiveMag,...
How should reinforcement learning (RL) agents explain themselves to humans not trained in AI? To gain insights into this question, we conducted a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants’ mental models of an RL agent in the context of a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. The four treatments isolated...
Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in...
Inclusive design is important in today's software industry, but there is little research about how to teach it. In collaboration with 9 teacher-researchers across 8 U.S. universities and more than 400 computer and information science students, we embarked upon an Action Research investigation to gather insights into the pedagogical content...
Software history and version control systems (VCS) are an important source of information for developers. This entails the need for a principled understanding of developers’ information seeking in VCS, both for improving existing tools as well as understanding requirements for new tools. However, it is only recently that researchers have...
Complex information environments are often organized as hierarchies. However, computational models of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) have almost entirely ignored this fact. Models and tools for predicting programmer navigations have ignored people’s foraging behavior across hierarchies —called hierarchical foraging. Without modeling hierarchical foraging, our ability to build tools to support...
Assessing and understanding intelligent agents can be a difficult task for users who may lack an artificial intelligence (AI) background. A relatively new area, called “explainable AI,” is emerging to help address this problem, but little is known about how to present and structure information that an explanation system might...