UX is often about hiding the things users don’t care about so that they get the simplest experience possible. Most users wouldn’t even know how to read a line of Java code, much less what that means to them. My Master’s project was designing transparency mechanisms for games that utilized AI agents. Essentially, the challenge was to present the state of the AI agent in such a way that the user understood what the AI agent was doing and why but also explain the algorithm in laymen’s terms. In most interfaces, transparency won’t be that complicated, but we still need to consider when we might want to present transparency to a user. Here’s 5 quick tips about transparency in UIs.
