PERUI nMEDIAGamSimSocLegTechMeth

Personalized User Interfaces in Real World Contexts

Project Leader Project Co-leader
Michael Terry
University of Waterloo
Joanna McGrenere
University of British Columbia

Modern content creation tools offer a wide range of sophisticated capabilities, but at the cost of overwhelming options and commands. Sophistication is a natural byproduct of supporting a wide range of tasks and users, but it easily overwhelms novices and experienced users, especially when learning new tasks. New interface paradigms are needed to enable users to effectively and efficiently manage complexity.

Personalization techniques draw upon recent advances in machine learning and statistical inferencing to better understand users’ tasks, intentions and goals, allowing a system to adapt and teach the user how to best use the application. Mature open source applications will be used to conduct large-scale, longitudinal research on usability and feature sets. 

PERUI will investigate interface personalization techniques to address problems of complexity and learnability in modern interfaces.