Usable AI: Experience and Reflections

Adaptive Interfaces: Do People Want Them? Automatic adaptation of user interfaces is a contentious area. Proponents (e.g., [1]) argue that it offers the potential to optimize interactions for a user’s tasks and style while critics (e.g., [4]) maintain that the inherent unpredictability of adaptive interfaces may disorient the user, causing more harm than good. Surprisingly, however, there is very little past research explicitly studying automatic adaptation in graphical user interfaces. The existing research includes both positive and negative examples of adaptation, sometimes reporting contradictory results without analyzing the reasons underlying the discrepancy (e.g., [4] and [13]).