What is it about?

In an age where technology reigns supreme, the debate surrounding the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into various facets of our lives rages on. From streamlining processes to enhancing productivity, AI holds immense promise. But what about its impact on the very essence of our humanity? Are we at risk of being sidelined by the very creations we’ve engineered? Our recent research delved into this question, focusing on the delicate balance between automation and augmentation—in the realm of website usability evaluation. We set out to explore the interplay between usability evaluators and AI tools, seeking to understand how varying levels of automation impact the ability of evaluators to identify usability issues, involving a total of 99 participants in a user study. Our findings shed light on a nuanced landscape where automation isn’t merely a threat to human involvement but can actually enhance it.

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Why is it important?

The results show that a fully automated approach indeed proved adept at identifying significant usability problems, particularly those of medium to high severity. This underscores the efficiency and effectiveness of AI in specific contexts. What truly caught our attention was the potential of augmented approaches: by blending human expertise with AI assistance, we discovered a sweet spot where low-severity usability issues were more readily detected.

Perspectives

I loved conceiving, designing, conducting and analyzing this experiment! It was really interesting and it provided a ground to test the basic assumptions of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: wether or not AI should augment rather than automate humans. And that is what I believe is the main takeaway of the study. The empirical data clearly show that providing full control to users, or augmenting their capabilities, by default is not the right approach. In fact, a fully automated approach (i.e., replacing users - even if the negative connotation of the term should be dropped) may be beneficial in some cases, depending on users goals. This highlights the need for user study from the start when designing AI!

Andrea Esposito
Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

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This page is a summary of: The fine line between automation and augmentation in website usability evaluation, Scientific Reports, May 2024, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-59616-0.
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