User as Student: Towards an Adaptive Interface for Advanced Web-Based Applications

This paper discusses the problems of developing adaptive self-explaining interfaces for advanced World-Wide Web (WWW) applications. Two kinds of adaptation are considered: incremental learning and incremental interfaces. The key problem for these kinds of adaptation is to decide which interface features should be explained or enabled next. We analyze possible ways to implement incremental learning and incremental interfaces on the WWW and suggest a “user as student” approach. With this approach, the order of learning or enabling of interface features is determined by adaptive sequencing, a popular intelligent tutoring technology, which is based on the pedagogical model of the interface and user knowledge about it. We describe in detail how this approach was implemented in the InterBook system, a shell for developing Web-based adaptive electronic textbooks.