Prerequisites for a Personalizable User Interface

Interfaces that support customization and can adapt to individuals’ specific use patterns may be more effective than ones designed to be “one size fits all”. However, to test whether such interfaces benefit users in actual everyday applications, a lot of underlying application infrastructure must be reimplemented to accommodate customization and adaptation. In this paper we discuss Haystack, a platform for building information applications in which user interface concepts such as commands, views, and widgets and even application data itself is described as a semantic network, providing a flexible environment for prototyping notions of customization. Haystack’s data model can host information that used to be managed by multiple applications, meaning that users can use Haystack to interact with their data under a single paradigm, and adaptability and customization capabilities can be provided across multiple domains at once. Author