Using the crowd to understand and adapt user interfaces
Jeffrey W. Nichols · 2013
Engineering user interfaces has long implied careful design carried out using formal methods applied by human experts and automated systems. While these methods have advantages, especially for creating interfaces that have the flexibility to adapt to users and situations, they can also be time consuming, expensive, and there are relatively few experts able to apply them effectively. In particular, many engineering methods require the construction of one or more models, each of which can only be created through many hours of work by an expert. In this keynote, I will explore how social and human computation methods can be applied to reduce the barriers to achieving user interface flexibility and ultimately to using engineering methods. In a first example, I will illustrate how groups of users can work together to modify and improve user interfaces through end-user programming examples from the CoScripter and Highlight projects. I will then discuss some initial work on using a crowd of novice workers to create models of existing user interfaces. I hope this keynote will inspire the engineering community to consider alternate approaches that creatively combine formal methods with the power of crowds.