Prerequisites for a personalizable user interface

2006

Abstract User interfaces are becoming more and more complex. Adaptable and adaptive interfaces have been proposed to address this issue and previous studies have shown that users prefer interfaces that they can adapt to self-adjusting ones. However, most existing systems provide users with little support for adapting their interfaces. Interface customization techniques are still very primitive and usually constricted to particular applications.

Proceedings of WWW2003, 2007

A major stumbling block in the use of information management tools such as desktops, email managers, file browsers and web browsers is the mismatch between the user's mental model of information objects and the system's implementation model. While ...

Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '06, 2006

User interfaces are becoming more and more complex. Adaptable and adaptive interfaces have been proposed to address this issue and previous studies have shown that users prefer interfaces that they can adapt to selfadjusting ones. However, most existing systems provide users with little support for adapting their interfaces. Interface customization techniques are still very primitive and usually constricted to particular applications. In this paper, we present User Interface Façades, a system that provides users with simple ways to adapt, reconfigure, and re-combine existing graphical interfaces, through the use of direct manipulation techniques. The paper describes the user's view of the system, provides some technical details, and presents several examples to illustrate its potential.

Proceedings of the 17th …, 2004

Many applications provide a form-like interface for requesting information: the user fills in some fields, submits the form, and the application presents corresponding results. Such a procedure becomes burdensome if (1) the user must submit many different requests, for example in pursuing a trial-and-error search, (2) results from one application are to be used as inputs for another, requiring the user to transfer them by hand, or (3) the user wants to compare results, but only the results from one request can be seen at a time. We describe how users can reduce this burden by creating custom interfaces using three mechanisms: clipping of input and result elements from existing applications to form cells on a spreadsheet; connecting these cells using formulas, thus enabling result transfer between applications; and cloning cells so that multiple requests can be handled side by side. We demonstrate a prototype of these mechanisms, initially specialised for handling Web applications, and show how it lets users build new interfaces to suit their individual needs.

Ingenieria Industrial, 2003

Se propone una experiencia para el usuario más enriquecedora e integrada, basada en la idea del lifestreams o flujos de tiempo de vida que fue propuesta primeramente por David Gelernter. En ella las diferentes partes de una experiencia del usuario (mensajes de correo electrónico, temas de discusión entre grupos, paginas Web, tarjetas electrónicas, etc.) son organizadas activamente por la computadora de acuerdo con las reglas definidas por el usuario. Estas reglas permiten que la aplicación lifestream sean almacenadas activamente y auxilien al usuario en el procesamiento de los datos, en lugar de su almacenamiento pasivo. Se presenta cómo esta experiencia del usuario puede ser implantada parcialmente mediante el uso de las infraestructuras existentes tales, como JavaMail Application Programming Interface (API), e Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mail servers. También se propone una arquitectura basada en un software libre (open-source), que cuando sea implantada, podría dar una visión más completa y directa del lifestreams. We propose a richer and more integrated user experience, based on the idea of lifestreams or streams of living time first proposed by David Gelernter, where the various parts of a user's experience (email messages, newsgroup posts, web pages, electronic business cards, etc.) are actively organized by the computer according to user-defined rules. These rules allow the lifestream application to actively store and assist in managing user data, instead of passively storing it. We show how this user experience can be partially implemented by using existing infrastructures such as the JavaMail Application Programming Interface (API), and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mail servers. We also propose an architecture based on opensource software, which, when implemented, would more fully and directly implement the vision of lifestreams. Palabras clave / Key words Lifestreams (flujos en vivo), correo electrónico, servidores de correo electrónico, interacción hombre máquina, arquitectura de máquinas Lifestreams, email clients, email servers, human-computer interaction, system architecture TOWARDS AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR IMPROVED USER EXPERIENCES

2010

Today's computer-human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the person's effectiveness-not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the person's effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design. We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 10 17 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions, Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user-and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated.

D-Lib Magazine, 1999

We describe the conceptual architecture of a Personalized Information Environment or \PIE". A PIE allows uni ed, highly customizable access to distributed information resources by p r o viding users the tools to compose personalized collections from a palette of information resources. The architecture also provides for the e cient \exchange" of inter-resource metainformation like collection statistics in order to maximize retrieval e ectiveness. This paper includes the enunciation of the user-centered PIE vision, an architectural requirements specication, and an architectural description that meets the speci cation and supports the vision. We also describe our current implementation and research e orts conducted within the PIE framework.

1990

INGRID is an interactive tool for user interface construction. The tool enforces a specific user interface model that considers both the functional composition of the user interface elements and an object-oriented approach as the fundamental design and development methodology. The implementation of INGRID highlights three main components: a run-time support system for interactive programming (in C++), a toolkit that defines the abstract interfaces to the several components of the UI allowing integration of ...

Computers & graphics, 1995

Several user and task modeling approaches evolved during the past years and were applied to certain problem areas showing different strengths and weaknesses. A qualitative comparison of these approaches and techniques is di&.ult since the application and experimentation environments vary. On the other hand, the integration of approved user modeling techniques with different application environments is usually difficult if not impossible. We propose a framework that, in a first step, allows the direct comparison of results of different user and task modeling approaches in graphical user interfaces. The objective is the development of appropriate adaptive help systems for new and existing applications. The system is therefore designed as a client-server architecture to support multi-user operation. The implementation can be easily adapted to different application systems. Applications can be upgraded in a well-defined way, and with a minimal amount of effort by using the approach and tools presented in this paper. A prototype-implementation is presented consisting of an interaction protocoling and managing kernel, a user evaluating module and a corresponding adaptive help system applied to sample medical and CAD experimentation environments.

2000

Abstract A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers—virtually all applications today are built using some form of user interface tool. In this article, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work.