PervasiveCrystal: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Pervasive Computing Applications

Users often become frustrated when they are unable to understand and control a pervasive computing environment. Previous studies have shown that allowing users to pose why and why not questions about context-aware applications resulted in better understanding and stronger feelings of trust. Although why and why not questions have been used before to aid in debugging and to clarify graphical user interfaces, it is currently not clear how they can be integrated into pervasive computing systems. We explain in detail how we have extended an existing pervasive computing framework with support for why and why not questions. This resulted in PervasiveCrystal, a system for asking and answering why and why not questions in pervasive computing environments.