In this paper, the authors conduct a survey with a listing of known technological risks, asking the participants to rate the severity of each risk. The authors state that their research is an extension of prior work done in the 1980s. The paper’s survey was taken between experts and non-experts, where experts were collected from Twitter and non-experts from Mturk. From the old work and their own, the authors found that people tend to rate voluntary risks low even if in reality they are high. They also found that many emerging technological risks were regarded as involuntary. It was also shown that non-experts tended to underestimate the risks of new technologies. The authors also introduce a risk-sensitive design based on their findings. The authors show a risk-perception graph that can be used to decide whether a proposed technology is perceived by non-experts as risky as experts think or are underestimated and whether the design is acceptable.
This paper nicely captures the user characteristics of technical risk perception. I liked that the paper did not end explaining the results but also went further to propose a tool for technical designers. However, it was a little unclear to me how to use the tool. The risk-perception graph that the authors show only has “low” and “high” on the axis’s labels, which are very subjective terms. A way to quantify risk perception would have served nicely.
This paper also made me think what’s the point of providing terms of use for a product if the users get the feeling that they have involuntarily exposed to risk. I feel like a better representation would be needed. For example, a short summary outlining the most important risks in a short sentence and providing details in a separate link would be more effective than throwing a wall of text at a (most likely) non-technical user.
I also think a way to address the gap of risk perception between designers and users is to involve users in the development process in the first place. I am unsure of the exact term, but I recall learning about the term users-in-the-loop development cycle from a UX class. This development method allows designers to fix user problems early in the process and end up with higher quality products. I feel it would also inform the designers more about potential risks.
These are the questions that I had while reading the paper:
1. What are some disasters that may happen due to the gap in risk perception between users and designers of a system? Would any additional risks occur due to this gap?
2. What would be a good way to reduce the gap in risk perception? Do you think using the risk-perception graph from the paper is useful for addressing this gap? How would you measure the risk?
3. Would you use the authors’ proposed risk-sensitive design approach in your project? What kind of risks do you expect from your project? Are they technical issues and do you think your users will underestimate the risk?
I found it interesting and surprising to learn that the survey results indicated that both experts and non-experts rated nearly all risks as characteristically involuntary.
I like the point you make about the usefulness of a terms of service of a product given this perception of users. I agree that a summarization of the most important risks would definitely be useful and a step in the right direction (especially in case of non-expert users). I, however, wonder about the number of users who would go through these summaries – especially in cases of more complex systems that may contain multiple risks.