Humans-in-the-Contestability-Loop: Designing for Social Counselors to Understand and Challenge Algorithmic Decisions

Humans-in-the-Contestability-Loop: Designing for Social Counselors to Understand and Challenge Algorithmic Decisions

Abstract

Making algorithmic decisions explainable and contestable is essential to ensure the responsible use of high-risk AI systems. Yet the human-centered design and implementation of explainability and contestability remain underexplored in empirical research. In this paper, we follow a participatory design approach in three stages to develop an interface that supports social counselors in understanding and contesting a welfare fraud detection system. We analyze counselors' information needs, derive functional and usability requirements, and design and evaluate both low-fidelity and high-fidelity interfaces that implement these requirements. Our findings show that contesting administrative decisions is a complex socio-technical process involving social counselors, clients, and social agencies, requiring carefully tuned explanation and contestation elements. Social counselors prioritized procedural information and tools for interactive exploration of model predictions, while emphasizing that explanations must be concise, easy to understand, and sensitive to the emotional impact of information on clients. We find that human intervention remains crucial in contestation processes, that explanations can support counselors by surfacing contestation reasons and facilitating client-side communication, and that conversational explanations enable flexible inquiry. Our insights contribute to trustworthy AI implementations by outlining the potential and challenges of a human-centered explanation and contestation interface for individuals affected by high-risk AI systems.

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Authors
  • Schmude, Timothée
  • Pahr, Daniel
  • Koesten, Laura
  • Möller, Torsten
  • Tschiatschek, Sebastian
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
ACM FAccT conference 2026
Divisions
Data Mining and Machine Learning
Visualization and Data Analysis
Event Location
Montréal, Canada
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
25.06.-28.06.2026
Series Name
FAccT '26: The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transpare
Page Range
pp. 1749-1783
Date
25 June 2026
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