This chapter describes how the research for developing quantitative measures for misinforming originated. The original circumstances lead to identify that the problem of misinforming exists and deserves quantified measuring, and to initiate research on how to measure the likelihood of the risk of misinforming. These circumstances have completely different objectives and the construction of the initial model to quantify the risk of misinform was developed to illustrate the needs for paying attention to users in designing interface in a computer application. The aim was to expose that users could be misled by information acquired in information system and the importance of carefully designed user interface to avoid misinforming. The original idea was to illustrate for a potential information systems designer the importance of considering the end-users' background and the way they adopt information.
TopOriginal Case
I identified the problem of the needs of measuring probability of risk of misinforming for the first time during teaching a class of Information Systems in 2001. One of the objectives of this lecture was to demonstrate to students how important is to consider recipients’ or end-users’ background and the manner to deal with data when designing computer systems interface. The use of users’ professional jargon, and to have in mind the way how they will interpret information and how they will map received information to the problems they are facing. To convince students that misunderstanding is quite likely I offered students an assignment. The purpose was to contrast the information provided from the sender to receiver within a problem domain. The sender describes a product as its technical parameters and the receiver describes the needs in terms of usage of the product. To illustrate this issue of designing Information Systems I provided to students an advertisement describing personal computers (PC) and a list of reasons to use it that they may need. Major activities for accomplishment with the use of the PC they are considering justifying purchasing of a PC. Practically, the majority of students in their sophomore year faced the problem to purchase PC and they were well prepared to respond regarding what they want to do with this device. I picked one advertisement for a PC from a newspaper and modified its description a bit in the following way: increased the power of CPU, added more primary and secondary memory, replaced the colored with a black-and-white (BW) monitor, practically remove the network capability. This description is presented in Figure 1. Keep in mind that this PC configuration was typical in the year 2001.
Additionally, I listed a set of typical activities a PC was used at that time:
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Develop and edit text. Word Processing.
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Make complex and even sophisticated computations.
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Use of e-mail
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Access to Internet, searching.
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Organize personal data.
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Play games.
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Watch movies and listen to music.
The PC, as described above, allows one to easily accomplish some of these activities, some – not so well, but others – not at all. Students were asked to define what they are going to do with the PC, and whether the proposed one suits their needs, if the price is attractive.
Answers of students (about 50 in two sections of the course) are shown on Table 1. (see Christozov, Mateev, 2003):