Automatic generation of user interaction models

Abstract

A prominent requirement in the field of human-computer interaction is to make mobile applications more usable and better adjusted to their users’ needs. In particular, designers of groupware applications face the task of developing software for many users while making it work as if it was designed for each single individual. User modeling research has attempted to address these issues. A precondition for achieving this task is to find predictive and generative models of the user interactions. In this paper we develop a methodology for modeling the user behavior when interacting with a computer system. The byproduct of this methodology is a low level representation of the user interactions in the form of weighted automata, which can be easily transformed into user profiles in text form. Profiles can then be used by the designer to configure and verify the task model of the system.