The software engineering of adaptive human-computer interfaces

A conceptual research framework is presented for studying and designing adaptive human-computer interfaces that modify themselves dynamically with respect to the current user and the current context. This framework is based on the software engineering principle for constructing an abstract specification that incorporates all the necessary information about the entity. The goal of this approach is to implement an abstract interface that is composed of an abstract user, an abstract system, and an abstract application. The paper concerns the design of the abstract user. The abstract user is seen as an interaction between a static production model of the goals necessary to accomplish a specific task and a dynamic production model of a user's goal hierarchy for accomplishing that task. This framework suggests that the task model necessarily follows from the specifics of the task domain. Further, the user's goal model must be constructed by monitoring the user's actions, deducing the goals, and comparing the user's goal hierarchy with the set of goals that the task model requires.<>