Automatically generating personalized user interfaces with Supple Original Research Article

Todayʹs computer–human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the personʹs effectiveness—not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the personʹs effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design. We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a personʹs devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 1017 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions, Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user- and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated. Supple is not intended to replace human user interface designers—instead, it offers alternative user interfaces for those people whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the hand-crafted designs. Indeed, the results of our study show that, compared to manufacturersʹ defaults, interfaces automatically generated by Supple significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of people with motor impairments.