Visualization of uncertainty in context aware mobile applications

Context-aware mobile applications and systems have been extensively explored in the last decade and in the last few years we already saw promising products on the market. Most of these applications assume that context data is highly accurate. But in practice this information is often unreliable, especially when gathered from sensors or external sources. Previous research has argued that the system usability can be improved by displaying the uncertainty to the user. The research presented in this paper shows that it is not always an advantage to show the confidence of the context-aware application to the user. We developed a system for automatic form filling on mobile devices which fills in any web form with user data stored on the mobile device. The used algorithm generates rules which indicate with which probability which input field of a form should be filled in with which value. Based on this we developed two versions of our system. One shows the uncertainty of the system and one not. We then conducted a user study which shows that the user needs slightly more time and produces slightly more errors when the confidence of the system is visualized.