Interaction Anticipation: Communicating Impacts of Groupware Configuration Settings to Users

Making Decisions About Digital Legacy with Google’s Inactive Account Manager

“…To guide the analysis we used CIAC, a set of concerns raised in an earlier conceptual discussion of issues in communicating how configurable interactions might evolve over time, particularly when the configurations include relationships with other users (see Table 1; the challenges are introduced and discussed in [10]). …”

“…Previous literature has shown that allowing users to visualize the future states resulting from their decisions and exploring them (e.g., in a simulated environment) would improve their understanding of the decisions [10]. Building such supports would increase the cost of providing users with services like IAM.…”

“…Nonetheless, digital legacy planning is an excellent domain for consideration, because all impacts will take place in a future in which users will not be around to check if their configuration decisions achieved their intended effects. By using the interaction anticipation challenges proposed in [10] we have generated a specific account of how these challenges can be useful to the designing or evaluating digital legacy systems. Also, the analysis illustrates how to use CIAC in combination with SIM.…”

“…This process might seem simple, but beyond the emotional cost of planning for one's own death, users must also anticipate the future system states that are desired and map these to software configurations; this anticipation includes data accesses and interactions that will be enabled or disabled by these states. Prates et al [10] discuss the challenges of anticipating what interactions may occur over time from configuration decisions. For digital legacy, having a clear understanding of the impact of these decisions is especially relevant, because users will not be there to repair poor decisions.…”

“…Our goal is twofold: discuss the digital legacy management interface; and show how to use Configurable Interaction Anticipation Challenges (CIAC) [10] to analyze support for user configuration over time. Google IAM presents only a few legacy configuration decisions at this point, but our analysis helps to articulate the system design space related to digital legacy management, as well as the more general challenge of supporting configuration processes that impact interaction over time.…”