The PDA-LPA design space for user interface adaptation

This paper presents a design space for engineering adaptive user interfaces throughout the user interface development life cycle in order to describe any adaptation technique, adaptable or adaptive, to compare two or more techniques, and to generate new, perhaps unprecedented, techniques. Grounded in the theory of psychological perception, this design space structures the adaptation life cycle into two regulation loops between the user and the system: a perception-decision-action (PDA) loop for both the system and the user, and a learning-prediction-adaptation (LPA) for supporting the adaptation, this last being particularly expressive for adaptivity. This PDA-LPA design space enables defining properties for assessing the quality of these loops between the system and the end-user. This design space of is instantiated on two advanced adaptive user interfaces: adaptive user interfaces based on machine learning and adaptive layouts. This design space provides new insights for considering adaptivity design options.

I. Introduction

User Interface adaptation consists in modifying the User Interface (UI) of an interactive system to satisfy specific requirements. Adaptation falls into two categories depending on whom, the system and/or the end-user, is involved in the adaptation process [20], [23]: adaptability refers to the end-user's ability to adapt the UI [41] whereas adaptivity refers to the system's ability to perform UI adaptation [14]. Mixed-initiative adaptation [7] occurs when both the end-user and the system collaborate in the adaptation process. UI adaptation has been extensively investigated [20], researched [34], developed [28], and tested [38] with the ultimate goal of optimizing the overall end-users’ experience by increasing end-users’ performance and/or preferences [11], by reducing task completion time and error rate [5], by improving the subjective user's satisfaction, her learning curve [25].