Bringing Transparency Design into Practice

Intelligent systems, which are on their way to becoming mainstream in everyday products, make recommendations and decisions for users based on complex computations. Researchers and policy makers increasingly raise concerns regarding the lack of transparency and comprehensibility of these computations from the user perspective. Our aim is to advance existing UI guidelines for more transparency in complex real-world design scenarios involving multiple stakeholders. To this end, we contribute a stage-based participatory process for designing transparent interfaces incorporating perspectives of users, designers, and providers, which we developed and validated with a commercial intelligent fitness coach. With our work, we hope to provide guidance to practitioners and to pave the way for a pragmatic approach to transparency in intelligent systems.