If when is better than if (and while might help): on the importance of influencing mental models in EUD (a pilot study)

In this paper, we present a preliminary study aimed at improving the users' mental model of an automatic smart home system based on trigger-action rules. We hypothesized that a computational model of how the rules are evaluated and activated, coupled with a linguistic form of the rules that clarifies the difference between events and states, may improve accuracy in identifying buggy rules, which may eventually increase end-users' acceptance of this type of systems. This pilot study was conducted with non-programmers and provided some evidence in support of this hypothesis.