Adaptation of User Interface Based on Contextual Feedback

The spread of social networks and other online collaboration-related practices changes the target of software products from a single user to virtual communities. Such communities view user interfaces of social websites as communication partners (facilitators) rather than mere communication medium. Effective communication requires proper feedback from community-driven systems that create the illusion of active participation and control. Furthermore, feedback combined with community effort and evaluation mechanisms such as crowdvoting can be used as a vehicle for adaptation of interfaces to the requests of community. The implementation of community-driven interfaces requires the extension of existing user interface development architectures and design patterns. In this paper we analyse known user interaction and user interface models and present the contextual feedback based adaptation (CFBA) meta-model, the four-tiered user interface (4TUI) architecture, and the Model-Control-ViewAdapter (MCVA) pattern. A case study in the community-driven interface adaptation is presented. Keywords—user interface design, feedback modelling, adaptable interface, interface evolution, crowdvoting.