Predictability and accuracy in adaptive user interfaces

ABSTRACT

While proponents of adaptive user interfaces tout potential performance gains, critics argue that adaptation's unpredictability may disorient users, causing more harm than good. We present a study that examines the relative effects of predictability and accuracy on the usability of adaptive UIs. Our results show that increasing predictability and accuracy led to strongly improved satisfaction. Increasing accuracy also resulted in improved performance and higher utilization of the adaptive interface. Contrary to our expectations, improvement in accuracy had a stronger effect on performance, utilization and some satisfaction ratings than the improvement in predictability.

REFERENCES

• 1: Benyon, D. (1993) Adaptive systems: A solution to usability problems. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 3 (1), 65--87.
• 2: Leah Findlater , Joanna McGrenere, A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.89-96, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985704]
• 3: Leah Findlater , Joanna McGrenere, Impact of screen size on performance, awareness, and user satisfaction with adaptive graphical user interfaces, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1357054.1357249]
• 4: Krzysztof Z. Gajos , Mary Czerwinski , Desney S. Tan , Daniel S. Weld, Exploring the design space for adaptive graphical user interfaces, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy [doi>10.1145/1133265.1133306]
• 5: Pattie Maes, Agents that reduce work and information overload, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.30-40, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176792]
• 6: Jakob Nielsen, Enhancing the explanatory power of usability heuristics, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.152-158, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191729]
• 7: Tim F. Paymans , Jasper Lindenberg , Mark Neerincx, Usability trade-offs for adaptive user interfaces: ease of use and learnability, Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 13-16, 2004, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal [doi>10.1145/964442.964512]
• 8: Andrew Sears , Ben Shneiderman, Split menus: effectively using selection frequency to organize menus, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.1 n.1, p.27-51, March 1994 [doi>10.1145/174630.174632]
• 9: Shaffer, J. (1995) Multiple Hypothesis-Testing. Annual Review of Psychology 46, 561--584.
• 10: Ben Shneiderman, Direct manipulation for comprehensible, predictable and controllable user interfaces, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.33-39, January 06-09, 1997, Orlando, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/238218.238281]
• 11: Theophanis Tsandilas , m. c. schraefel, An empirical assessment of adaptation techniques, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1057079]
• 12: Winship, C. and Mare, R. (1984) Regression Models with Ordinal Variables. Am. Soc. Rev. 49 (4), 512--525.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
accuracy, adaptive interfaces, predictability, user study