Social Computing and Usability Metrics: Toward User- Centered and Adaptive Interaction Agents

In this paper we propose to include two up-to-date separate concepts, namely social computing and usability metrics, in intelligent interaction agents to enhance a user-centered, adaptive human-computer interaction (HCI). Social computing refers to the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems. We introduce accountability as an idea essential to social computing in the analysis of software systems. Another idea underlying social computing is that, by configuring the space in different ways, different kinds of behavior can be supported. Usability metrics are software quality metrics with a long history of successful application in software engineering. We introduce preference metrics, which quantify the subjective evaluations and preferences of users, and performance metrics, which measure the actual use of working software, as other parameters that enable user interface adaptation. From all terms, a novel user-centered and adaptive interaction agents’ architecture is proposed.