| Summary: | Personalized graphical user interfaces have the potential to reduce visual
complexity and improve efficiency by modifying the interface to better suit an
individual user's needs. Working in a personalized interface can make users
faster, more accurate and more satisfied; in practice, however, personalization
also comes with costs, such as a reliance on user effort to control the
personalization, or the introduction of spatial instability when interface items
are reorganized automatically. We conducted a series of studies to examine both
the costs and benefits of personalization, and to identify techniques and
contexts that would be the most likely to provide an overall benefit.
We first interviewed long-term users of a software application that provides
adaptable (user-controlled) personalization. A design trade-off that emerged is
that while personalization can increase the accessibility of features useful to a
user's current task, it may in turn negatively impact the user's awareness of the
full set of available features. To assess this potential trade-off, we introduced
awareness as an evaluation metric to be used alongside more standard performance
measures and we ran a series of three studies to understand how awareness relates
to core task performance. These studies used two different measures to assess
awareness, showing that personalization can impact both the recognition rate of
unused features in the interface and user performance on new tasks requiring
those features. We investigated both adaptive (system-controlled) and adaptable
personalization techniques to help us understand the generalizability of the
awareness concept.
In addition to introducing and incorporating awareness into our evaluations, we
studied how specific contextual and design characteristics impact the user's
experience with adaptive interfaces. In one study, we evaluated the impact of
screen size on performance and user satisfaction with adaptive split menus.
Results showed that the performance and satisfaction benefits of spatially
reorganizing items in the interface are more likely to outweigh the costs when
screen size is small. We also introduced a new adaptive personalization technique
that maintains spatial stability, called ephemeral adaptation, and evaluated it
through two studies. Ephemeral adaptation improves performance over both
another closely related adaptive technique and a traditional interface.
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