Workshop on User-Centred Design and Evaluation of Adaptive Systems
Stephan Weibelzahl, Judith Masthoff, Alexandros Paramythis, Lex Stefan van Velsen · University of Twente Research Information · 2009
Just about all of the usual methods for the user-centered design and evaluation of interactive systems are in principle applicable to systems that adapt to their users. This talk will first look at some special considerations that arise with user-adaptive systems (in addition to the goal of evaluating the accuracy of the system’s user modeling) such as: the possibility of using relevant human experts either as judges of the appropriateness of the system’s adaptation or as wizards within the Wizard-of-Oz paradigm; the difficulties involved in empirically comparing adaptive and nonadaptive variants of a given system; and the need to deal with the frequently large differences in users’ reactions to system adaptivity. The second part of the talk will illustrate why many research and design methods that are often used for other types of system deserve to be applied to a comparable extent to user-adaptive systems. In particular, it is argued that the designers of a user-adaptive system should be open-minded with regard to the possibility that the goals that they intend to achieve with user-adaptivity can better be achieved by other means.