Everyday Intentionality, Metacognition, and Technology Use: A Mixed-Method Approach.

Ava Elizabeth Scott. 2026.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10224735/

People increasingly use technologies, such as reminders, meeting software, and large language models, to support the fulfilment of their daily plans and long-term goals. The broad applicability of these technologies puts the onus on individual users to determine when and why they need technological support. This thesis explores how people make these decisions by drawing on their understanding of their intentions (i.e. their reasoned plans for action), and of their abilities and confidence (i.e. metacognition). Furthermore, this thesis explores how technologies can be designed to support people’s reasoning about their intentions and abilities in their everyday lives.

This thesis reports five empirical studies involving a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using a series of online surveys, I examine how confidence predicts reminder use and find evidence for metacognitive hindsight bias in everyday plans. I describe a participatory design study that explores how people reason about their behaviour and create their own technological interventions using Trigger–Action Programming. Turning to shared intentions, I describe an interview study investigating how people articulate and reflect on their meeting goals and evaluate a prototype conversational user interface designed to support this.

This thesis illustrates how intentionality and metacognition are interdependent processes, through which people assess their abilities to realise their intentions in an unpredictable world. By contrasting quantitative and qualitative methods, I describe the respective utilities of compressing the feeling of confidence into a number, versus expanding it through descriptive reasoning. While the latter facilitates greater articulation of possibilities, people can find thinking about an uncertain future effortful; I discuss how interfaces can be designed to make this effort more worthwhile, by focusing on long-term, repeated intentions, and by ensuring reflection generates useful, shareable technological artefacts.