Communicating and visualising multicriterial trustworthiness under uncertainty

Florian Volk, Sascha Hauke, Daniel Dieth, Max Mühlhäuser

Abstract: Visualisations are often used to communicate trust-worthiness to end users. Showing a number of stars, for example, is a well-known practice in e-commerce applications to communicate the quality of a product or service. Many products or services also have their quality - in terms of trustworthiness - described along more than one dimension, so that not only an overall trust score has to be communicated, but multiple scores, one for each dimension. Current visualisations of such a multicriterial trustworthiness are often based on the display of multiple individual star-like interfaces - a practice that offers room for improvement with regard to intuitive understanding of the displayed trust information. In this paper, we present T-Viz, a trust visualisation based on radar plots and pie charts. T-Viz concurrently shows multiple trust scores, one for each dimension, along with an aggregated trust score. Moreover, T-Viz also shows a reliability measure for every trust score graphically, in the form of a certainty score. The evaluation results from a pilot study with eleven participants indicate that T-Viz is an intuitive, comprehensible and clear interface. It succeeds at visualising and communicating multicriterial trust scores under uncertainty in one, easy to understand, graphical representation.