Neurodivergent students bring diverse cognitive styles and work patterns, and they are often a key audience for digital distraction blockers aimed at managing attention. However, it remains unclear whether these tools are grounded in their lived experiences, raising concerns that tool design may overlook neurodivergent practices and inadvertently reinforce neuronormative perspectives. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 post-secondary students with ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and/or Generalized Anxiety Disorder to examine how they use distraction blockers. Our thematic analysis shows how neurodivergent students adapt blockers for regulating stimulation levels, but also encounter tensions between their work rhythms and tool design rooted in fixed, linear time structures, which may exacerbate self-stigmatizing comparisons. We call for distraction blockers that empower neurodivergent strengths by normalizing and scaffolding diverse ways of working, such as hyperfocus and non-linear workflows, and help navigate known tensions between flexibility and structure towards more inclusive digital well-being tools.

Digital tools promoting individual focus are increasingly popular in knowledge work. Yet their narrow framing of attention as a binary of focus versus non-focus can be unsustainable and discourage engagement in other vital activities, such as team coordination and collaboration. We introduce TimeMarbles, a web app that encourages more holistic self-reflection by tracking three modes of focus: high-focus, normal-focus, and break, as well as a team vs. individual dimension. In a two-week comparative structured observation in the field with 24 knowledge workers across six countries, we explored how users experience TimeMarbles vs. a more traditional focus-centric web app. Our thematic analysis shows that participants felt more positive about their day when tracking their time in TimeMarbles and that, despite the added logging effort, they preferred the more granular approach because it better represented the range of different attention and activities that characterize their workday. Our work points toward re-imagining digital workplace time-tracking tools to better support worker wellbeing.

Expressing oneself appropriately in online meetings through non-verbal cues can be challenging for knowledge workers. Automatic non-verbal cue detection technologies have the potential to support workers' self-presentation efforts through real-time feedback, but little is known about workers' reactions to and the implications of doing so. We designed and implemented Novecs as a technology probe of a real-time feedback display that automatically detects and signals users' own non-verbal cues -- smiling, nodding, gaze, and posture. Novecs was deployed in an exploratory field study (n=18) to support knowledge workers' self-presentation in their everyday meetings. Post-study interviews reveal how Novecs' real-time feedback helped increase in-the-moment self-awareness, and how neutrally-framed feedback may help navigate tensions between authentic and in-authentic self-presentation. Participants also emphasized the need for natural timing when adjusting non-verbal cues in-meeting. We discuss design opportunities and challenges of real-time, non-verbal cue feedback systems, such as personalizing feedback based on different meeting types.

While users of all ages fall victim to misinformation sharing on social media, older adults (OAs) may be particularly vulnerable. Yet, current misinformation interventions have rarely incorporated their needs. With the growing adoption of social media among OAs, it is essential to understand their perspectives on credibility assessment and its perceived impact on sharing decisions. Leveraging friends and family (FnF) to support credibility assessment is a promising approach; however, little is known about how OAs value it relative to assessing credibility individually. To probe this question, we created a prototype with different design variants that nudge users before sharing potential misinformation. We conducted comparative structured observations of 12 OAs engaging with the design variants over selected social media posts, examining their perspectives on individual and FnF-based community assessment. Our thematic analysis reveals that OAs prefer an independent approach while assessing credibility because of its flexibility and autonomy, but involving FnF is often desired for the social opportunities it offers, such as shared decision-making and enhancing interpersonal relationships. OAs perceive multifaceted risks when sharing across inner (FnF) and outer circles and exhibit varying trust in the perceived expertise of individually explored information sources, compared to that of FnF. Drawing on a nuanced understanding of social and relational factors that shape OAs' outlook toward engaging FnF in fact-checking, we highlight the design challenges and opportunities for empowering OAs to mitigate the social risks in seeking assessment support from their closest communities.

Semi-structured interviews are a critical qualitative method in many areas, including CSCW and HCI, enabling researchers to uncover deep contextualized insights. Using this flexible method, interviewers must adapt to interviewees' responses while adhering to the protocol, necessitating strong active listening and real-time analytical skills. While recent studies have explored how AI can support researchers in qualitative analysis, to our knowledge, no research has investigated AI's role in supporting semi-structured interviews while they are underway. Taking one step toward filling this gap, we interviewed 16 researchers with a range of prior interviewing expertise. Our inductive thematic analysis reveals that interviewers expect real-time AI assistance to support research objectives and facilitate interpersonal communication, but also have concerns about its impact on long-term skill development. We discuss how semi-structured interviews differ from other problem-solving or creative human-AI collaboration contexts, highlighting the time constraints, multimodal collaboration, and the triangular dynamic among interviewers, interviewees, and AI. We also delve into how interviewers' levels of expertise affect their envisioned interviewer-AI collaboration. We then propose design challenges for future CSCW work on AI-driven assistants in interview contexts.

Stigma around mental health significantly hinders help-seeking behavior among university students, especially international students and those of Asian heritage. Digital storytelling can address this stigma by allowing individuals to share personal experiences, dispel negative attitudes, and foster community. However, current platforms often miss opportunities to engage users actively and supportively. To address this, we designed and implemented Digital Human Library (DHL), a story-sharing platform prototype, through brainstorming sessions with HCI researchers and a mental health nurse. We conducted a week-long diary study and semi-structured interviews with 16 university students to assess DHL's impact on self-efficacy toward seeking mental health help. Thematic analysis revealed that trust in professionals' and peers' stories can enhance self-efficacy but may be hindered if stories lack rich contextual details. DHL's support for gradual engagement helps users overcome initial reservations about seeking professional help and effectively helps them to think about future next steps, including becoming the storyteller themselves. This study highlights the potential for DHL to support mental health storytelling and suggests design implications for future HCI and CSCW research, emphasizing the importance of integrating supportive and engaging elements in digital platforms.

Technology-mediated communication tools are widely used to maintain connections between older adults and their remote family members. However, challenges often arise due to differences in their life rhythms and communication preferences, such as time zones, daily routines, or preferred platforms. To address these challenges, we propose using Ditto, a mimetic embodied agent, in video-call-like interactions between an older adult and a remote family member. When direct interaction is difficult, FamilyDitto can represent either party, providing a strong social presence and a personalized experience to the other person. To explore the potential of Ditto in supporting intergenerational communication, we conducted seven co-design workshops (n=27) with older adults and younger family members. Our thematic analysis reveals Ditto's potential roles as both a temporal bridge and an emotional proxy, identifies the tension between faithful and idealized representations, and emphasizes the importance of personalization to support unique family dynamics. We distill our findings into implications for designing mediated semi-synchronous communication, using idealized representation responsibly, and addressing the asymmetric motivations and comfort levels with Ditto across roles and ages. This study provides a foundation for mimetic AI technologies that enhance, rather than replace, human connection in remote intergenerational relationships.

Although HCI researchers often generate and compare new design concepts, they lack an established method for rigorously conducting qualitative assessments . We define and characterize Comparative Structured Observation as a qualitative research method that takes advantage of the structure of controlled experiments to generate comparable, ecologically relevant experiences with two or more design variants, often implemented as medium-fidelity prototypes. Researchers observe users and ask them to compare and reflect on each variant. We identify criteria for creating a successful Comparative Structured Observation study and illustrate variations of the method by analyzing four published studies. We also examine six additional studies (three “near” and three “far”) to clarify the boundary between what should and should not be considered a Comparative Structured Observation . We discuss the benefits and limitations of the method and argue that gathering comparative reflections about design variants can help researchers assess and advance their design concepts.

Intergenerational communication can enhance well-being and family cohesion, but stereotypes and low empathy can be barriers to achieving effective communication. VR perspective-taking is a potential approach that is known to enhance understanding and empathy toward others by allowing a user to take another’s viewpoint. In this study, we introduce LegacySphere, a novel VR perspective-taking experience leveraging the combination of embodiment, role-play, and storytelling. To explore LegacySphere’s design and impact, we conducted an observational study involving five dyads with a one-generation gap. We found that LegacySphere promotes empathetic and reflexive intergenerational dialogue. Specifically, avatar embodiment encourages what we term “relationship cushioning,” fostering a trustful, open environment for genuine communications. The blending of real and embodied identities prompts insightful questions, merging both perspectives. The experience also nurtures a sense of unity and stimulates reflections on aging. Our work highlights the potential of immersive technologies for enhancing empathetic intergenerational relationships.

Older adults commonly rely on younger family members for remote tech support, but the current general-purpose video-conferencing platforms fall short of effectively catering to their needs. We introduce the design concept and prototypes for HelpCall, an augmentation of these platforms that provides aids for learning computer tasks, including a step-by-step visual guide automatically generated from synchronous human instruction. Through observations and interviews with older adults (N=14), we assessed the potential of the HelpCall concept and compared its two design candidates: Tooltip with numbered location markers and List of written steps. All participants acknowledged HelpCall’s potential to improve the comfort and efficiency of synchronous tech support. Tooltip emerged as more promising and could be enhanced by incorporating the well-received features from List. Our findings provide clear directions for advancing HelpCall design and new insights into designing synchronous software help for older adults, taking a step towards universal accessibility of digital technology.

This paper explores the design challenges that arise in supporting online freelancers to navigate relationships with clients. Prior studies have shown that current platform designs can lead to worker precarity in freelancer-client relationships, such as power imbalances, information asymmetry, and labor abuse. To envision alternative designs that empower workers in managing their relationships with clients, we engaged 22 Upwork freelancers in participatory speculative design activities. Through this co-design process, we identified design tensions that constrain design options as a result of conflicting values and priorities that could only be balanced and compromised rather than completely resolved. Six design tensions were identified in the context of designing for four different phases of freelancing. We observed three patterns in these tensions: 1) the freelancers' need for client involvement in their tasks and career growth, which conflicted with their skepticism that clients had sufficient incentives to be involved; 2) that there was often no viable balancing option for some tensions, but they could be addressed through changes in the platform's incentive structure; and 3) some tensions occurred not only between freelancers and clients, but also within the freelancer community. We present three approaches for addressing these design tensions and discuss how this research can support more equitable and healthy freelancer-client relationships.

Today’s knowledge workers face cognitively demanding tasks and blurred work-life boundaries amidst rising stress and burnout in the workplace. Holistic approaches to supporting workers, which consider both productivity and well-being, are increasingly important. Taking this holistic approach, we designed an intervention inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy that consists of: (1) using the term “Time Well Spent” (TWS) in place of “productivity”, (2) a mobile self-logging tool for logging activities, feelings, and thoughts at work, and (3) a visualization that guides users to reflect on their data. We ran a 4-week exploratory qualitative comparison in the field with 24 graduate students to examine ourTherapy-inspiredintervention alongside a classicBaselineintervention. Participants who used our intervention often shifted toward a holistic perspective of their primary working hours, which included an increased consideration of breaks and emotions. No such change was seen by those who used theBaselineintervention.

Mental health problems are a serious concern among university students, and international students in Canada are known to be particularly vulnerable due to the underutilization of mental health services and unfamiliarity with Western approaches to mental health. However, international students' mental well-being remains underexplored in HCI. In this study, we conducted remote synchronous remote co-design sessions with 19 participants (14 international students, 5 mental health professionals) to understand concretely what types of designs for interactive technologies suit these students' mental health needs and challenges. Based on their brainstormed ideas and sketches, we produced a set of design dimensions that span different types of support, interaction, and safety. The dimensions were then used to develop a set of four medium-fidelity mockups that spanned these dimensions, presenting a diverse range of design features. Using these mockups, we elicited feedback in an online survey from the same participants. Findings suggest that the students negotiate a complex understanding of helpfulness, comfort, and trust when they consider what types of designs to consider using. Each mockup highlights different ways to support individual differences and preferences. Our work serves as a foundation for designing technologies that can ease issues with accessibility and be more inclusive of international students' cultural backgrounds.

Distracting mobile notifications are a high-profile problem but previous research suggests notification management tools are underused because of the barriers users face in relation to the perceived benefits. We posit that users might be more motivated to personalize if they could view contextual data for how personalizations would have impacted their recent notifications. We propose the ‘Reflective Spring Cleaning’ approach to support notification management through infrequent personalization with visualization of collected notification data. To simplify and contextualize key trends in a user’s notifications, we framed these visualizations within a novel who-what-when data abstraction. We evaluated it through a four-week longitudinal study: 21 participants logged their notifications before and after a personalization session that included suggestions for notification management contextualized against visualizations of their recent notifications. A debriefing interview described their new experience after two more weeks of logging. Our approach encouraged users to critically reflect on their notifications, which frequently inspired them to personalize and improved the experience of the majority.

Amidst increasing reports of mental health problems in Canadian university students, those of Asian descent have particularly struggled to seek out services due to cultural barriers. Counselling practices have long noted that culture influences how mental health is perceived and treated, yet the design of mental health technologies is limited with respect to how users’ backgrounds influence usability and adoption. To identify inclusive design opportunities, we interviewed 20 East Asian university students in Canada. We found that they struggle to engage with technologies for mental health due to cultural stigma which have led them to prefer apps that support self-help though still valuing social help. We present inclusive design opportunities for mental health technologies that sensitively consider these challenges, including supporting learning opportunities with peers through storytelling and skill-sharing to promote literacy, empowerment, and advocacy for their own health. We conclude by discussing how universities can promote mental wellbeing more inclusively.

Instructors regularly learn and customize various feature-rich software applications to meet their unique classroom needs. Although instructors often prefer social help from colleagues to navigate this complex and time-consuming learning process, it can be difficult for them to locate relevant task-specific customizations, a challenge only exacerbated by the transition to online teaching due to COVID-19. To mitigate this, we explored how instructors could use an example-based customization sharing platform to discover, try, and appropriate their colleagues’ customizations within a learning management system (LMS). Our field deployment study revealed diverse ways that ten instructors from different backgrounds used customization sharing features to streamline their workflows, improve their LMS feature awareness, and explore new possibilities for designing their courses to match student expectations. Our findings provide new knowledge about customization sharing practices, highlighting the complex interplay of expertise, software learnability, domain-specific workflows, and social perceptions.

Digital data has become a key part of everyday life: people manage increasingly large and disparate collections of photos, documents, media, etc. But what happens after death? How can users select and prepare what data to leave behind before their eventual death? To explore how to support users, we first ran an ideation workshop to generate design ideas; then, we created a design workbook with 12 speculative concepts that explore diverging approaches and perspectives. We elicited reactions to the concepts from 20 participants (18-81, varied occupations). We found that participants anticipated different types of motivation at different life stages, wished for tools to feel personal and intimate, and preferred individual control on their post-death self-representation. They also found comprehensive data replicas creepy and saw smart assistants as potential aides for suggesting meaningful data. Based on the results, we discuss key directions for designing more personalized and respectful death-preparation tools.

This work investigates the practices and challenges of voice user interface (VUI) designers. Existing VUI design guidelines recommend that designers strive for natural human-agent conversation. However, the literature leaves a critical gap regarding how designers pursue naturalness in VUIs and what their struggles are in doing so. Bridging this gap is necessary for identifying designers’ needs and supporting them. Our interviews with 20 VUI designers identified 12 ways that designers characterize and approach naturalness in VUIs. We categorized these characteristics into three groupings based on the types of conversational context that each characteristic contributes to: Social, Transactional, and Core. Our results contribute new findings on designers’ challenges, such as a design dilemma in augmenting task-oriented VUIs with social conversations, difficulties in writing for spoken language, lack of proper tool support for imbuing synthesized voice with expressivity, and implications for developing design tools and guidelines.

Technology adoption among older adults has increased significantly in recent years. Yet, as new technologies proliferate and the demographics of aging shift, continued attention to older adults’ adoption priorities and learning preferences is required. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine the factors adults 65+ prioritize in choosing new technologies, the challenges they encounter in learning to use them, and the human and material resources they employ to support these efforts. Using a video prototype as a design probe, we present scenarios to explore older adults’ perceptions of adoption and learning new technologies within the lens of health management support, a relevant and beneficial context for older adults. Our results reveal that participants appreciated self-paced learning, remote support, and flexible learning methods, and were less reliant on instruction manuals than in the past. This work provides insight into older adults’ evolving challenges, learning needs, and design opportunities for next generation learning support.

People increasingly access cross-device applications from their smartphones while on the go. Yet, they do not fully use the mobile versions for complex tasks, preferring the desktop version of the same application. We conducted a survey (N=77) to identify challenges when switching back and forth between devices. We discovered significant cross-device learnability issues, including that users often find exploring the mobile version frustrating, which leads to prematurely giving up on using the mobile version. Based on the findings, we created four design concepts as video prototypes to explore how to support cross-device learnability. The concepts vary in four key dimensions: the device involved, automation, temporality, and learning approach. Interviews (N=20) probing the design concepts identified individual differences affecting cross-device learning preferences, and that users are more motivated to use cross-device applications when offered the right cross-device learnability support. We conclude with future design directions for supporting seamless cross-device learnability.

Learning to use a learning management system (LMS) can often be complex and challenging for instructors who have little time to explore the application interface. We ran formative interviews (N=10) suggesting that instructors often prefer to consult colleagues to seek examples of customizations and their explanations. Based on our findings, we designed and developed Customizer, an in-context example-based customization sharing platform that runs atop a widely-used LMS and facilitates discovery of relevant customizations shared by peers. Customizer allows instructors to experiment with shared customizations in familiar contexts by copying their course content into on-the-fly testing environments, minimizing any risk of breaking their live course setups. Our usability evaluation (N=10) showed that most users found Customizer intuitive and useful, and that its exploratory interface was helpful in a variety of use cases. Furthermore, many participants saw potential for Customizer to improve their workflows in other applications beyond educational contexts.

The advent of cloud platforms and mobile devices has complicated personal data management and decisions about what data to keep or discard. To explore how to help people curate their data, we designed Data Dashboard, a prototype system that provides: 1) a centralized overview of data from across platforms and devices, 2) customizable filters for sorting through many types of data. We evaluated the prototype with 18 participants. Building on top of previous literature, we use the concept of data boundaries (the idea of invisible but important separations across data) to explain participants' reactions to the prototype. We show that centralizing data in a single management system blurs boundaries and requires safety guarantees. Customization options, instead, uphold boundaries and reinforce user control. We discuss how to use these results for integrating data boundaries in the design of new tools, rethinking the language of personal data, and envisioning a post-cloud future.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) devices are becoming easier to access and use, but the barrier to entry for creating AR/VR applications remains high. Although the recent spike in HCI research on novel AR/VR tools is promising, we lack insights into how AR/VR creators use today's state-of-the-art authoring tools as well as the types of challenges that they face. We interviewed 21 AR/VR creators, which we grouped into hobbyists, domain experts, and professional designers. Despite having a variety of motivations and skillsets, they described similar challenges in designing and building AR/VR applications. We synthesize 8 key barriers that AR/VR creators face nowadays, starting from prototyping the initial experiences to dealing with "the many unknowns" during implementation, to facing difficulties in testing applications. Based on our analysis, we discuss the importance of considering end-user developers as a growing population of AR/VR creators, how we can build learning opportunities into AR/VR tools, and the need for building AR/VR toolchains that integrate debugging and testing.

The modern workplace is more demanding than ever before. Yet, since the industrial age, productivity measures have predominantly stayed narrowly focused on the output of the work, and not accounted for the big shift in the cognitive demands placed on the workers or the interleaving of work and life that is so common today. We posit that a more holistic conceptualization of Time Well Spent (TWS) at work could mitigate this issue. In our 1-week study, 40 knowledge workers used the experience sampling method (ESM) to rate their TWS and then define TWS at the end of the week. Our work contributes a preliminary characterization of TWS and empirical evidence that this term can capture a more holistic notion of work that also includes the worker's feelings and well-being.

Listening to text using read-aloud applications is a popular way for people to consume content when their visual attention is situationally impaired (e.g., commuting, walking, tired eyes). However, due to the linear nature of audio, such apps do not support skimming---a non-linear, rapid form of reading---essential for quickly grasping the gist and organization of difficult texts, like academic or professional documents. To support auditory skimming for situational impairments, we (1) identified the user needs and challenges in auditory skimming through a formative study (N=20), (2) derived the concept of "eyes-reduced" skimming that blends auditory and visual modes of reading, inspired by how participants mixed visual and non-visual interactions, (3) generated a set of design guidelines for eyes-reduced skimming, and (4) designed and evaluated a novel audio skimming app that embodies the guidelines. Our in-situ preliminary observation study (N=6) suggested that participants were positive about our design and were able to auditorily skim documents. We discuss design implications for eyes-reduced reading, read-aloud apps, and text-to-speech engines.

Feature-rich applications such as word processors and spreadsheets are not only being used by adults but increasingly by children and older adults as well. Learning these applications is challenging as they offer hundreds of commands throughout the interface. We investigate how newcomers from different age groups explore the user interface of a feature-rich application to determine, locate, and use relevant features. We conducted an in-lab observational study with 10 children (10-12), 10 adults (20-35) and 10 older adults (60-75) who were first-time users of Microsoft OneNote. Our results illustrate key exploration differences across age groups, including that children were careful and performed as efficiently as the adults, whereas older adults spent a longer time and repeated sequences of failed selections. Further, their exploration style was negatively influenced by their past knowledge of similar applications. We discuss design interventions to accommodate these exploration differences and to improve software onboarding for newcomers.

Online step-by-step text and video tutorials play an integral role in learning feature-rich software applications. However, when searching, users can find it difficult to assess whether a tutorial is designed for their level of software expertise. Novice users can struggle when a tutorial is out of their reach, whereas more advanced users can end up wasting time with overly simple, first-principles instruction. To assist users in selecting tutorials, we investigate the feasibility of using machine-learning techniques to automatically assess a tutorial's difficulty. Using Photoshop as our primary testbed, we develop a set of distinguishable tutorial features, and use these features to train a classifier that can label a tutorial as either Beginner or Advanced with 85% accuracy. To illustrate a potential application, we developed a tutorial browsing interface called TutVis. Our initial user evaluation provides insight into TutVis's ability to support users in a range of tutorial selection scenarios.

Question and answer (Q&A) sites can capture a range of user perspectives on using complex, feature-rich software. Little is known, however, on who is contributing to the sites. We look at contribution diversity from the perspective of gender in a domain with near gender parity: graphic design. Through content analysis of 330 answers from two popular Q&A sites and semi-structured interviews with 24 graphic designers, we examine who is contributing, what content, how the community shows appreciation towards their answers, and perceived motivations and barriers to participation. We find that despite gender balance in the field, women contribute far less frequently than men. We also see gender differences in contribution styles and user appreciation. Our interviews shed further light on how Q&A community cultures might be impacting men and women differently and how design choices made by the sites? developers might be exacerbating these differences. We suggest implications for design for improving gender inclusivity.

Today, most technology users have to deal with a growing amount of personal data across many devices and online platforms. There is a growing need for tools that can help people decide more intentionally what data to keep or discard. We created five design concepts in the form of video prototypes to probe on alternative design strategies for supporting users. Automation, aggressiveness, and temporality were key dimensions we explored. We conducted interviews with 16 participants using the concepts as a starting point for discussion. Participants had a range of reactions: some wanted to retain full control over keeping and discarding decisions, while others welcomed more automatic tools. We identify common ground in the need for a contextual and nuanced approach in design. We use these results to outline and reflect on possible future design directions for personalization, automation, new keeping or discarding actions, and privacy.

A rapid proliferation of specialized consumer tech gadgets (e.g., Fitbits) demands attention to the challenges that individuals face in learning to use them. Help Kiosk (HK) was initially conceived to support older adults in independently learning to use a smartphone, but it was only ever examined for this one context. Its design also required users to divide their attention between different areas of an augmented display and their smartphone. We introduce HK 2.0, which leverages a 40" tabletop display to integrate support into one visual space, while also supporting older adults in learning how to use multiple smart devices that must be configured to work together (e.g., a smartwatch synched to a tablet). Our new system also builds on the self-directed learning environment of the initial HK by introducing a collaborative learning feature to provide remote support by family and friends. We share the design of HK 2.0, including design requirements, features, and learning topics.

Couples exhibit special communication practices, but apps rarely offer couple-specific functionality. Research shows that sharing streams of contextual information (e.g. location, motion) helps couples coordinate and feel more connected. Most studies explored a single, ephemeral stream; we study how couples' communication changes when sharing multiple, persistent streams. We designed Lifelines, a mobile-app technology probe that visualizes up to six streams on a shared timeline: closeness to home, battery level, steps, media playing, texts and calls. A month-long study with nine couples showed that partners interpreted information mostly from individual streams, but also combined them for more nuanced interpretations. Persistent streams allowed missing data to become meaningful and provided new ways of understanding each other. Unexpected patterns from any stream can trigger calls and texts, whereas seeing expected data can replace direct communication, which may improve or disrupt established communication practices. We conclude with design implications for mediating awareness within couples.

For most modern feature-rich software, considerable external help and learning resources are available on the web (e.g., documentation, tutorials, videos, Q&A forums). But, how do users new to an application discover and make use of such resources? We conducted in-lab and diary studies with 26 software newcomers from a variety of different backgrounds who were all using Fusion 360, a 3D modeling application, for the first time. Our results illustrate newcomers' diverse needs, perceptions, and help-seeking behaviors. We found a number of distinctions in how technical and non-technical users approached help-seeking, including: when and how they initiated the help-seeking process, their struggles in recognizing relevant help, the degree to which they made coordinated use of the application and different resources, and in how they perceived the utility of different help formats. We discuss implications for moving beyond "one-size-fits-all" help resources towards more structured, personalized, and curated help and learning materials.

Although modern classrooms are increasingly moving towards digital immersion and personalized learning, we have few insights into K-12 teachers' current practices, motivations, and barriers in setting up their digital classroom ecosystems. We interviewed 20 teachers on their process of discovering and integrating a vast range of productivity software and educational platforms in their classrooms, with a particular focus on how they personalize the UI and content of these tools (e.g., with plugins, templates, or option menus). We found that teachers largely depended on their own experimentation and professional circles to find, personalize, and troubleshoot software tools to support student needs or their own preferences. Teachers were often hesitant to attempt more advanced personalizations due to concerns over student confusion and increased troubleshooting load. We derive several design implications for HCI to better support teachers in sharing their personalized setups and helping their students benefit from digital immersion.

The growing adoption of emojis, stickers and GIFs suggests a corresponding demand for rich, personalized expression in messaging apps. Some people customize apps to enable more personal forms of expression, yet we know little about how such customizations shape everyday communication. Since people increasingly communicate via multiple apps side-by-side, we are also interested in how customizing one app influences communication via other apps. We created a taxonomy of customization options based on interviews with 15 "extreme users" of communication apps. We found that participants tailored their apps to express their identities, organizational culture, and intimate bonds with others. They also experienced expression breakdowns: frustrations around barriers to transferring personal forms of expression across apps, which inspired inventive workarounds to maintain cross-app habits of expression, such as briefly switching apps to generate and export content for a particular conversation. We conclude with implications for personalized expression in ecosystems of communication apps.

Older adults have difficulty using and learning to use smart phones, in part because the displays are too small to provide effective interactive help. Our work explores the use of a large display to temporarily augment the small phone display to support older adults during learning episodes. We designed and implemented a learning system called Help Kiosk which contains unique features to scaffold the smart phone learning process for older adults. We conducted a mixed-methods user study with 16 older adults (55+) to understand the impact of this unique design approach, comparing it with the smart phone's official printed instruction manual. We found Help Kiosk gave participants more confidence that they were doing the tasks correctly, and helped minimize the need to switch their attention between the instructions and their phone.

We introduce BIGFile, a new fast file retrieval technique based on the Bayesian Information Gain framework. BIGFile provides interface shortcuts to assist the user in navigating to a desired target (file or folder). BIGFile's split interface combines a traditional list view with an adaptive area that displays shortcuts to the set of file paths estimated by our computationally efficient algorithm. Users can navigate the list as usual, or select any part of the paths in the adaptive area. A pilot study of 15 users informed the design of BIGFile, revealing the size and structure of their file systems and their file retrieval practices. Our simulations show that BIGFile outperforms Fitchett et al.'s AccessRank, a best-of-breed prediction algorithm. We conducted an experiment to compare BIGFile with ARFile (AccessRank instantiated in a split interface) and with a Finder-like list view as baseline. BIGFile was by far the most efficient technique (up to 44% faster than ARFile and 64% faster than Finder), and participants unanimously preferred the split interfaces to the Finder.

Digital data, from texts to files and mobile applications, has become a pervasive component of our society. With seemingly unlimited storage in the cloud at their disposal, how do people approach data preservation, deciding what to keep and discard? We interviewed 23 participants with diverse backgrounds, asking them about their perceived digital data: what "stuff" they kept through the years, why, how they used it, and what they considered important. In an iterative analysis process, we uncovered a spectrum of tendencies that drive preservation strategies, with two extremes: hoarding (where participants accumulated large amounts of data, even if considered of little value) and minimalism (where they kept as little as possible, regularly cleaning their data). We contrast and compare the two extremes of the spectrum, characterize their nuanced nature, and discuss how our categorization compares to previously reported behaviors such as filing and piling, email cleaners and keepers. We conclude with broad implications for shaping technology.

The needs and capabilities of a person with severe disabilities are often so specific that designing for the person is like designing for a "universe of one." This project addresses this problem for women with Rett syndrome, a disorder accompanied by severe cognitive, communication, and motor impairment. The research team adapted participatory design techniques to work with five such women, and their families, to design and evaluate new assistive technology for these women. The process suggests a class of media-playing devices that would be generally useful to women with Rett syndrome: systems that can load multiple audio or video segments; be activated by many different switches; and respond instantly to switch-hits. As well, the systems should permit a caregiver to set the start and end time of each segment, and how the system advances through a sequence of segments. The paper also discusses patterns that were observed when collaborating with the families. For example, parents shared longstanding but untried ideas for new assistive technology; and expressed a strong interest in any device that would help their daughters do things for themselves.

Although users accomplish ever more tasks on touch-enabled mobile devices, gesture-based interaction remains limited and almost never customizable by users. Our goal is to help users create gestures that are both personally memorable and reliably recognized by a touch-enabled mobile device. We address these competing requirements with two dynamic guides that use progressive feedforward to interactively visualize the "negative space" of unused gestures: the Pathward technique suggests four possible completions to the current gesture, and the Fieldward technique uses color gradients to reveal optimal directions for creating recognizable gestures. We ran a two-part experiment in which 27 participants each created 42 personal gesture shortcuts on a smartphone, using Pathward, Fieldward or No Feedforward. The Fieldward technique best supported the most common user strategy, i.e. to create a memorable gesture first and then adapt it to be recognized by the system. Users preferred the Fieldward technique to Pathward or No Feedforward, and remembered gestures more easily when using the technique. Dynamic guides can help developers design novel gesture vocabularies and support users as they design custom gestures for mobile applications.

Users must manage frequent software and operating system upgrades across multiple computing devices. While current research focuses primarily on the security aspect, we investigate the user's perspective of upgrading software. Our first study (n=65) found that users delay major upgrades by an average of 80 days. We then ran a field study (n=14), beginning with in-depth observations during an operating system upgrade, followed by a four-week diary study. Very few participants prepared for upgrades (e.g., backing up files), and over half had negative reactions to the upgrade process and other changes (e.g., bugs, lost settings, unwanted features). During the upgrade process, waiting times were too long, feedback was confusing or misleading, and few had clear mental models of what was happening. Users almost never mentioned security as a concern or reason for upgrading. By contrast, interviews (n=3) with technical staff responsible for one organization's upgrades focused only on security and licensing, not user interface changes. We conclude with recommendations to improve the user's upgrade experience.

The rise of open platforms and public APIs has enabled more users of customizable software to customize by installing plugins or add-ons that are created and shared by others. Despite the prevalence of online customization sharing, we know little about how and why online customizations are shared. Through interviews with 20 users of four diverse systems who have extensive experience with sharing their customizations, we reveal the concept of customization sharing ecosystems. These ecosystems include multiple components for hosting customizations, discussing, and managing them; the ecosystems are sustained through users acting in a diverse set of roles (e.g., sharers, re-users, reviewers, problem reporters, requesters, helpers, publicizers, and packers). Our interviews also reveal motivations for creating and sharing customizations online which overlap considerably with those in open source software. Our findings highlight tradeoffs and design considerations in these ecosystems.

Users can often find it difficult to sift through dense help pages, tutorials, Q&A sites, blogs, and wikis to locate useful task-specific instructions for feature-rich applications. We present Social CheatSheet, an interactive information overlay that can appear atop any existing web application and retrieve relevant step-by-step instructions and tutorials curated by other users. Based on results of our formative study, the system offers several features for users to search, browse, filter, and bookmark community-generated help content and to ask questions and clarifications. Furthermore, Social CheatSheet includes embedded curation features for users to generate their own annotated notes and tutorials that can be kept private or shared with the user community. A weeklong deployment study with 15 users showed that users found Social CheatSheet to be useful and they were able to easily both add their own curated content and locate content generated by other users. The majority of users wanted to keep using the system beyond the deployment. We discuss the potential of Social CheatSheet as an application-independent platform driven by community curation efforts to lower the barriers in finding relevant help and instructions.

Many applications provide personalization mechanisms through which users can make changes to adapt a system to better fit their needs or preferences. However, advanced personalization, such as extending system functionality, is often only available to programmers. Building on ideas from end-user programming and personalization literature, we developed an adaptable task management tool that allows advanced personalization using a self-disclosing mechanism and a guided scripting mechanism, ScriPer. We present our design process, its outcome, and the results of a user study (n=24). Participants, even those with no to some background in programming, were able to use ScriPer to perform advanced personalization (in 142 of 144 trials). We also found error patterns differed across programming expertise.

The settings panel is the standard customization mechanism used in software applications today, yet it has undergone minimal design improvement since its introduction in the 1980s. Entirely disconnected from the application UI, these panels require users to rely on often-cryptic text labels to identify the settings they want to change. We propose the Anchored Customization approach, which anchors settings to conceptually related elements of the application UI. Our Customization Layer prototype instantiates this approach: users can see which UI elements are customizable, and access their associated settings. We designed three variants of Customization Layer based on multi-layered interfaces, and implemented these variants on top of a popular web application for task management, Wunderlist. Two experiments (Mechanical Turk and face-to-face) with a total of 60 participants showed that the two minimalist variants were 35% faster than Wunderlist's settings panel. Our approach provides significant benefits for users while requiring little extra work from designers and developers of applications.

In order to reach targets with one hand on common large mobile touch displays, users tilt and shift the device in their hand. In this work, we use this grip change as a continuous information stream for detecting where the user will touch while their finger is still en-route. We refer to this as in the air prediction. We show that grip change detected using standard mobile motion sensors produces similar in the air touch point predictions to techniques that use auxiliary sensor arrays, even in varying physical scenarios such as interacting in a moving vehicle. Finally, our model that combines grip change and the resulting touch point predicted where users intended to land, lowering error rates by 41%.

This work reports on the design and evaluation of culturally appropriate technology for older adults. Our design context was Cognitive Testing on a Computer (C-TOC): a self-administered computerized test under development, intended to screen older adults for cognitive impairments. Using theory triangulation of cultural attitudes toward uncertainty, we designed two interfaces (one minimal and one rich) for one C-TOC subtest and hypothesized they would be culturally appropriate for older adult Caucasians and East Asians respectively. We ran an experiment with 36 participants to investigate cultural differences in performance, preference and anxiety. We found that Caucasians preferred the interface with minimal elements (i.e. those essential for the primary task) or had no preference. By contrast, East Asians preferred the rich interface augmented with security and learning support and felt less anxious with it than the minimal.

To moderate oral presentations a chair must manage time, and communicate time parameters to speakers through a variety of means. But speakers often miss time cues, chairs cannot confirm their receipt, and the broken dialogue can be a sideshow for the audience. We developed HaNS, a wireless wrist-worn chair-speaker Haptic Notification System that delivers tactile cues for time-managing oral presentations, and performed field observations at university research seminars and two mid-sized academic conferences (input from 66 speakers, 21 chairs, and 65 audience members). Results indicate that HaNS can improve a user's awareness of time, facilitate chair-speaker coordination, and reduce distraction of speaker and audience through its private communication channel. Eliminating overruns will require improvement in speaker 'internal' control, which our results suggest HaNS can also support given practice. We conclude with design guidelines for both conference-deployed and personal timing tools, using touch or another notification modality.

Interruptions in the home pose a threat to the validity of self-administered computerised cognitive testing. We report the findings of a laboratory experiment investigating the effects of increased interruption workload demand on older adults' computerised cognitive test performance. Related work has reported interruptions having a range of inhibitory and facilitatory effects on primary task performance. Cognitive ageing literature suggests that increased interruption workload demand should have greater detrimental effects on older adults' performance, when compared to younger adults. With 36 participants from 3 age groups (20-54, 55-69, 70+), we found divergent effects of increased interruption demand on two primary tasks. Results suggest that older and younger adults experience interruptions differently, but at no age is test performance compromised by demanding interruptions. This finding is reassuring with respect to the success of a self-administered computerised cognitive assessment test, and is likely to be useful for other applications used by older adults.

Rating interfaces are widely used on the Internet to elicit people's opinions. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of these interfaces and their design space is relatively unexplored. We provide a taxonomy for the design space by identifying two axes: Measurement Scale for absolute rating vs. relative ranking, and Recall Support for the amount of information provided about previously recorded opinions. We present an exploration of the design space through iterative prototyping of three alternative interfaces and their evaluation. Among many findings, the study showed that users do take advantage of recall support in interfaces, preferring those that provide it. Moreover, we found that designing ranking systems is challenging; there may be a mismatch between a ranking interface that forces people to specify a total ordering for a set of items, and their mental model that some items are not directly comparable to each other.

Recent keyboard-based alternatives to WIMP interfaces do not have good support for commands that require multiple parameters. We remedy this by extending a previous design and mimicking dialog boxes to provide good visual feedback while still keeping the advantages of keyboard input. A laboratory study showed the new technique to be competitive with dialog boxes on speed and error rate, but strongly preferred over dialog boxes by experienced command line users. This is a marked improvement over the previous design, which was also preferred by the target user group but did not compete with dialog boxes in terms of performance.

Mobile devices offer much potential to support older adults (age 65+). However, older adults have been relatively slow to adopt mobile devices. Although much ongoing HCI research has examined usability problems to address this issue, little work has looked at whether existing graphical icons are harder to use for this population compared with younger adults. We conducted a qualitative exploratory study and a follow-up experimental study to determine which icon characteristics help initial icon usability for older adults. We found that our older participants did have more problems using existing mobile device icons, but that particular icon characteristics – semantically close meaning (i.e. natural, close link between depicted objects and associated function), familiar, labelled and concrete (i.e. those depicting real-world objects) – improved icon usability for them. We discuss how these findings can help icon designers to create mobile device icons that are more suited to the abilities and technology experience of older adults.

Tablet PCs are gaining popularity but many older adults still struggle with pointing, particularly with two error types: missing, landing and lifting outside the target bounds; and slipping, landing on the target, but slipping off before lifting. To solve these problems, we examined the feasibility of extending and combining existing techniques designed for younger users and the mouse, focusing our investigation on the Bubble cursor and Steady Clicks techniques. Through a laboratory experiment with younger and older adults, we showed that both techniques can be adapted for use in a pen interface, and that combining the two techniques provides greater support than either technique on its own. Though our results were especially pertinent to the older group, both ages benefited from the designs. We also found that technique performance depended on task context. From these findings we established guidelines for technique selection.

We introduce ephemeral adaptation, a new adaptive GUI technique that improves performance by reducing visual search time while maintaining spatial consistency. Ephemeral adaptive interfaces employ gradual onset to draw the user's attention to predicted items: adaptively predicted items appear abruptly when the menu is opened, but non-predicted items fade in gradually. To demonstrate the benefit of ephemeral adaptation we conducted two experiments with a total of 48 users to show: (1) that ephemeral adaptive menus are faster than static menus when accuracy is high, and are not significantly slower when it is low and (2) that ephemeral adaptive menus are also faster than adaptive highlighting. While we focused on user-adaptive GUIs, ephemeral adaptation should be applicable to a broad range of visually complex tasks.

Tablet PCs are gaining popularity, but many users, particularly older ones, still struggle with pen-based interaction. One type of error, drifting, occurs when users accidentally hover over an adjacent menu, causing their focus menu to close and the adjacent one to open. In this paper, we propose two approaches to address drifting. The first, tap, requires an explicit tap to switch menus, and thus, eliminates the possibility of a drift. The second, glide, uses a distance threshold to delay switching, and thereby reduce the likelihood of a drift. We performed a comparative evaluation of our approaches with a control interface. Tap was effective at reducing drifts for both groups, but it was only popular among older users. Glide surprisingly did not show any performance improvement. Additional research is needed to determine if the negative findings for glide are a result of the particular threshold used, or reflect a fundamental flaw in the glide approach.

Adaptive personalization, where the system adapts the interface to a user's needs, has the potential for significant performance benefits on small screen devices. However, research on adaptive interfaces has almost exclusively focused on desktop displays. To explore how well previous findings generalize to small screen devices, we conducted a study with 36 subjects to compare adaptive interfaces for small and desktop-sized screens. Results show that high accuracy adaptive menus have an even larger positive impact on performance and satisfaction when screen real estate is constrained. The drawback of the high accuracy menus, however, is that they reduce the user's awareness of the full set of items in the interface, potentially making it more difficult for users to learn about new features.

Coarse-grained approaches to customization allow the user to enable or disable groups of features at once, rather than individual features. While this may reduce the complexity of customization and encourage more users to customize, the research challenges of designing such approaches have not been fully explored. To address this limitation, we conducted an interview study with 14 professional software developers who use an integrated development environment that provides a role-based, coarse-grained approach to customization. We identify challenges of designing coarse-grained customization models, including issues of functionality partitioning, presentation, and individual differences. These findings highlight potentially critical design choices, and provide direction for future work.

Talk is an application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device for people with aphasia, PhotoTalk focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be used independently. Our project used a streamlined process with 3 phases: (1) a rapid participatory design and development phase with two speech-language pathologists acting as representative users, (2) an informal usability study with 5 aphasic participants, which caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk, and (3) a 1 month field evaluation with 2 aphasic participants, which showed that both used it regularly and fairly independently, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. Our field study demonstrated PhotoTalk's promise in terms of its usability and usefulness in real life situations.

This paper presents the results of a study to gather information on the underlying causes of pen -based target acquisition difficulty. In order to observe both simple and complex interaction, two tasks (menu and Fitts' tapping) were used. Thirty-six participants across three age groups (18-54, 54-69, and 70-85) were included to draw out both general shortcomings of targeting, and those difficulties unique to older users. Three primary sources of target acquisition difficulty were identified: slipping off the target, drifting unexpectedly from one menu to the next, and missing a menu selection by selecting the top edge of the item below. Based on these difficulties, we then evolved several designs for improving pen-based target acquisition. An additional finding was that including older users as participants allowed us to uncover pen-interaction deficiencies that we would likely have missed otherwise.

This research examines a design guideline that aims to increase the positive perception of interruptions. The guideline advocates matching the amount of attention attracted by an interruption's notification method (attentional draw) to the utility of the interruption content. Our first experiment examined a set of 10 visual notification signals in terms of their detection times and established a set of three significantly different signals along the spectrum of attentional draw. Our second experiment investigated matching these different signals to interruption content with different levels of utility. Results indicate that the matching strategy decreases annoyance and increases perception of benefit compared to a strategy that uses the same signal regardless of interruption utility, with no significant impact on workload or performance. Design implications arising from the second experiment as well as recommendations for future work are discussed.

We describe a mixed-initiative framework designed to sup-port the customization of complex graphical user interfaces. The framework uses an innovative form of online GOMS analysis to provide the user with tailored customization sug-gestions aimed at maximizing the user’s performance with the interface. The suggestions are presented non-intrusively, minimizing disruption and allowing the user to maintain full control. The framework has been applied to a general user-productivity application. A formal user evaluation of the system provides encouraging evidence that this mixed-initiative approach is preferred to a purely adaptable alterna-tive and that the system’s suggestions help improve task per-formance.

Two approaches for supporting personalization in complex software are system-controlled adaptive menus and user-controlled adaptable menus. We evaluate a novel interface design for feature-rich productivity software based on adaptable menus. The design allows the user to easily customize a personalized interface, and also supports quick access to the default interface with all of the standard features. This design was prototyped as a front-end to a commercial word processor. A field experiment investigated users' personalizing behavior and tested the effects of different interface designs on users' satisfaction and their perceived ability to navigate, control, and learn the software. There were two conditions: a commercial word processor with adaptive menus and our prototype with adaptable menus for the same word processor. Our evaluation shows: (1) when provided with a flexible, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand customization mechanism, the majority of users do effectively personalize their interface; and (2) user-controlled interface adaptation with our adaptable menus results in better navigation and learnability, and allows for the adoption of different personalization strategies, as compared to a particular system-controlled adaptive menu system that implements a single strategy. We report qualitative data obtained from interviews and questionnaires with participants in the evaluation in addition to quantitative data.

We present a study that evaluates conventional Pan and Zoom Navigation and Rubber Sheet Navigation, a rectilinear Focus+Context technique. Each of the two navigation techniques was evaluated both with and without an overview. All interfaces guaranteed that regions of interest would remain visible, at least as a compressed landmark, independent of navigation actions. Interfaces implementing these techniques were used by 40 subjects to perform a task that involved navigating a large hierarchical tree dataset and making topological comparisons between nodes in the tree. Our results show that Pan and Zoom Navigation was significantly faster and required less mental effort than Rubber Sheet Navigation, independent of the presence or absence of an overview. Also, overviews did not appear to improve performance, but were still perceived as beneficial by users. We discuss the implications of our task and guaranteed visibility on the results and the limitations of our study, and we propose preliminary design guidelines and recommendations for future work.

Most co-authoring tools support basic annotations, such as edits and comments that are anchored at specific locations in the document. However, they do not support meta-commentary about a document (such as an author's summary of modifications) which gets separated from the document, often in the body of email messages. This causes unnecessary overhead in the write-review-edit workflow inherent in co-authoring. We present document-embedded structured annotations called "bundles" that incorporate the meta-commentary into a unified annotation model that meets a set of annotation requirements we identified through a small field investigation. A usability study with 20 subjects evaluated the annotation reviewing stage of co-authoring and showed that annotation bundles in our high-fidelity prototype reduced reviewing time and increased accuracy, compared to a system that only supports edits and comments.

Cooking is a daily activity for many people. However, traditional text recipes are often prohibitively difficult to follow for people with language disorders, such as aphasia. We have developed a multi-modal application that leverages the retained ability of aphasic individuals to recognize image-based representations of objects, providing a presentation format that can be more easily followed than a traditional text recipe. Through a systematic approach to developing a visual language for cooking, and the subsequent case study evaluation of a prototype developed according to this language, we show that a combination of visual instructions and navigational structure can help individuals with relatively large language deficits to cook more independently.

Aphasia is an acquired communication deficit that impacts the different language modalities. PDAs have a form factor and feature set that suggest they could be effective communication tools for people with aphasia. An ethnographic study was conducted with one participant both to learn about communication strategies used by people with aphasia, and to observe how a PDA is incorporated into those strategies. The most significant usability issues found were file access and organization. A participatory design phase followed, resulting in a paper prototype of a file management system that addressed the key usability issues identified. The participatory approach continued during the implementation of a high-fidelity prototype.

Software applications continue to grow in terms of the number of features they offer, making personalization increasingly important. Research has shown that most users prefer the control afforded by an adaptable approach to personalization rather than a system-controlled adaptive approach. No study, however, has compared the efficiency of the two approaches. In a controlled lab study with 27 subjects we compared the measured and perceived efficiency of three menu conditions: static, adaptable and adaptive. Each was implemented as a split menu, in which the top four items remained static, were adaptable by the subject, or adapted according to the subject's frequently and recently used items. The static menu was found to be significantly faster than the adaptive menu, and the adaptable menu was found to be significantly faster than the adaptive menu under certain conditions. The majority of users preferred the adaptable menu overall. Implications for interface design are discussed.

Aphasia is a cognitive disorder that impairs speech and language. From interviews with aphasic individuals, their caregivers, and speech-language pathologists, the need was identified for a daily planner that allows aphasic users to independently manage their appointments. We used a participatory design approach to develop ESI Planner (the Enhanced with Sound and Images Planner) for use on a PDA and subsequently evaluated it in a lab study. This methodology was used in order to achieve both usable and adoptable technology. In addition to describing our experience in designing ESI Planner, two main contributions are provided: general guidelines for working with special populations in the development of technology, and design guidelines for accessible handheld technology.

As computer applications become larger with every new version, there is a growing need to provide some way for users to manage the interface complexity. There are three different potential solutions to this problem: 1) an adaptable interface that allows users to customize the application to suit their needs; 2) an adaptive interface that performs the adaptation for the users; or 3) a combination of the adaptive and adaptable solutions, an approach that would be suitable in situations where users are not customizing effectively on their own. In this paper we examine what it means for users to engage in effective customization of a menu-based graphical user interface. We examine one aspect of effective customization, which is how characteristics of the users' tasks and customization behaviour affect their performance on those tasks. We do so by using a process model simulation based on cognitive modelling that generates quantitative predictions of user performance. Our results show that users can engage in customization behaviours that vary in efficiency. We use these results to suggest how adaptive support could be added to an adaptable interface to improve the effectiveness of the users' customization.

This study examines a novel interface design for heavily-featured productivity software. The design includes two interfaces between which the user can easily toggle: (1) an interface personalized by the user containing desired features only, and (2) the default interface with all the standard features. This design was prototyped as a front-end to a commercial word processor and evaluated in a comprehensive field study. The study tested the effects of different interface designs on users' satisfaction and their perceived ability to navigate, control, and learn the software. There were two conditions: a commercial word processor with adaptive menus and our two-interface prototype with adaptable menus for the same word processor. Results showed that participants were better able to navigate through the menus and toolbars and were better able to learn with our prototype. There were also significant differences in satisfaction and control with our design