Designing intelligent systems to handle system failures: Enhancing explanatory power with less restrictive user interfaces and deep explanations

This research empirically investigates the design choices that can be made to facilitate problem solving when intelligent systems fail. One way is to provide deep explanations, which are explanations that justify system actions. Another way is to manipulate system restrictiveness of the user interface. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of deep explanation support, as well as manipulations of system restrictiveness. Results suggest that the less restrictive system was more effective for problem‐solving situations where system failure occurred. In addition, deep explanations were found to be somewhat helpful in system understanding, and this, in turn, led to improved problem‐solving performance.