Designing user interfaces tailored to the current user's requirements in real time

Abstract

Traditional design of user interfaces is based on a perfect knowledge of the user's interaction requirements for the target audience. This approach leads to user interfaces designed for a generic ideal user who doesn't exist at all. As a result, every user or the interface has to adapt his/her own user's interaction requirements to those of this ideal user. In a ideal scenario, there should be as many versions of the user interface as final users. Each of those versions would be designed to satisfy the user's interaction requirements of a single user. Under this approach, we have designed GADEA, a user interface management system able to design different versions of a user interface, on the fly, depending on the cognitive, perceptive and motive skills of each user of the application. This system observes the users as they perform common tasks, analyzing their behavior in order to determine their interaction requirements. © Springer-Verlag 2004.