Automatically adapting system pace towards user pace — Empirical studies

An interactive application’s overall pace of interaction is a combination of the user’s pace and the system’s pace, and if the system’s pace is mismatched to the user’s pace (e.g., timeouts or animations are too fast or slow for the user), usability and user experience can be impaired. Through a series of four studies, we investigated whether users prefer systems where the system’s pace better matches their own pace. All of the studies used common drag-and-drop interactions with hierarchical folder widgets, in which a folder would expand when the cursor hovered over it for a timeout period. If the system pace in these interactions is too fast (i.e., the timeout is too short), then the user’s performance and subjective experience is likely to be impaired because of unintended expansions; and if the system pace is too slow (i.e., the timeout is too long), then performance and experience could be impaired by unnecessary delay before folders expand. The first experiment was designed to validate the premise that fast-paced users prefer a fast system pace to a slow one (and the inverse for slow-paced users), and results confirmed this premise. The second study used the first experiment’s data to look for measures of user pace that could enable automatic adaptation of system pace, and also examined whether participants adjusted their pace towards that of the system. The study found reliable measures of user pace and showed that participants do entrain to the system’s pace. The third and fourth studies examined whether users would prefer a system that adapted its pace to the user over a system that used a static baseline pace. Results indicated that a majority of fast-paced users preferred the adaptive interface, but that slow-paced users generally preferred the static baseline interface. We discuss several design implications, including opportunities for systems to improve user experience for fast users by automatically adapting system pace to user pace.