Pragmatic user modelling for complex commercial systems

While user modelling has become a mature field, with demonstrable research systems of great power, comparatively little progress has been made in the development of user modelling components for commercial software systems. The development of minimalist user modelling components, which are simplifie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Strachan, Linda Noreen
Language:en_US
Published: 2007
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1993/1579
Description
Summary:While user modelling has become a mature field, with demonstrable research systems of great power, comparatively little progress has been made in the development of user modelling components for commercial software systems. The development of minimalist user modelling components, which are simplified to provide "just enough" assistance to a user through a pragmatic adaptive user interface, is seen by many as an important step toward this goal. This thesis describes the development, implementation, and empirical evaluation of a minimalist user modelling component for the Tax and Investment Management Strategizer (TIMS), a complex commercial software system for financial management. The experimental results demonstrate that a minimalist user modelling component improves the subjective measure of user satisfaction. Important issues and considerations for the development of user modelling components for commercial software systems are also discussed.