What Impacts the Quality of the User Answers when Asked about the Current Context?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how reaction and completion times influence the quality of user answers in context-aware systems, identifying key factors affecting response accuracy and offering practical recommendations.

Contribution

It reveals reaction time as a primary factor impacting answer quality and identifies exogenous and endogenous influences on response times.

Findings

Reaction time significantly affects answer accuracy.

Situational and personal factors influence response times.

Recommendations for improving answer quality are provided.

Abstract

Sensor data provide an objective view of reality but fail to capture the subjective motivations behind an individual's behavior. This latter information is crucial for learning about the various dimensions of the personal context, thus increasing predictability. The main limitation is the human input, which is often not of the quality that is needed. The work so far has focused on the usually high number of missing answers. The focus of this paper is on \textit{the number of mistakes} made when answering questions. Three are the main contributions of this paper. First, we show that the user's reaction time, i.e., the time before starting to respond, is the main cause of a low answer quality, where its effects are both direct and indirect, the latter relating to its impact on the completion time, i.e., the time taken to compile the response. Second, we identify the specific exogenous (e.g., the situational or temporal context) and endogenous (e.g., mood, personality traits) factors which have an influence on the reaction time, as well as on the completion time. Third, we show how reaction and completion time compose their effects on the answer quality. The paper concludes with a set of actionable recommendations.