1. Personalising Interaction using Profiled Skins Nick Fine nick.fine@brunel.ac.uk Research Start: March 2004

2. Section 1 Background Information

3. Motivations for Research User Interfaces are designed for average or typical users……yet none of us are individually average. Why use interfaces designed for the everyman?

4. User-centred design seeks to “know the user” (Neilsen 1993) – yet we ignore the user and design for the average user.

5. Designing for Diversity Designing for the average user is designing for individual similarities. This research explores whether individual differences can be used to segment user populations, so that user interfaces can be designed for subsets of a larger population – towards a more personalised interface and subsequent interaction.

6. Towards the Individual: Designing for Subsets

7. Skins A skin is considered to be the appearance of the user interface, including graphic, haptic, and/or aural patterns. Skins are widely used to allow personalisation of the interface Facilitate changing the user interface without needing to recode Increasing availability of skinning features in operating systems and applications Provide great flexibility –Financially cost effective to whitebox –Easy to localise applications

10. Motivations for Research By providing skin selection as a feature of many applications we are in effect giving the user the ability to change the quality of their interaction. The ability to reskin an interface provides users the means to adapt the user interface but does not inform them as to how

11. Changing the user interface changes the quality of the Interaction : Change by aesthetic affect (Norman 2004, Reeves and Nass 1996) Change in configuration and usability (e.g. Fitts Law (access time is a function of distance and target size )) Skins and Interaction

12. Pilot Study Results – Study 1 Saati, Salem and Brinkman (2005): Interactive Behaviour and User Personality Significant correlations (p=0.01) between Clicks per day and button interclick time for extraversion and neuroticism Extraversion -.64** (friendliness -.54*, gregariousness -.53*) Neuroticism (anxiety.67**, self-consciousness.61*) Openness to Experience (liberalism -.60*)

13. Pilot Study Results – Study 2 Saati, Salem and Brinkman (2005): User Personality and Skin Colour Significant correlations (p=0.05) between skin colours: Blue (E + C), Yellow (C) and Black (A + O) Blue: Extraversion -.53* (assertiveness -.48*, cheerfulness (-.53*), conscientiousness (achievement-striving -.51*). Yellow: Conscientiousness (achievement-striving -.48*). Black: Agreeableness (altruism -.46*), Openness to experience (imagination.73**)

15. Section 2 Experimental Details

16. Goals To develop the experimental tools and infrastructure to observe and record interactive behaviours relating to the user interface skin To develop an empirically validated model to predict the most effective user interface skin for a user based upon their personality To develop a means for predicting user type without requiring user responses

17. Experimental Details How individual differences affect interactive behaviour as a function of user interface skin Dependent VariableInteractive Behaviour Independent VariableUser Interface Skins Personality Hypothesis: Changing the user interface skin will change interactive behaviour for different personality types

18. ProSkin Development Cycle

19. Database Overview

20. Infrastructure

21. Profiled Skins (ProSkin) Profiled Skins are user interface skins appropriate to a certain subset of users of similar profile ProSkin = image files + XML definition

22. ProSkin Components : XML

23. ProSkin Interface Components : Images Background Image Button Images State :Normal MouseOver Status Indicator State : On Off Radio Station Directory

27. Next Steps Final Release in September 2005 (first data) Writing up Chapters 2 and 3 Consider ProSkin browser experiment Offline experiments Additional independent variables, e.g. cognitive style

28. Publications International Conference on Entertainment Computing 2004 Fine, N., & Brinkman, W.-P. (2004). Avoiding Average: Recording Interaction Data to Design for Specific User Groups. In M. Rauterberg Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2004 (p.398-401). Berlin: Springer. European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence 2004 Fine, N., & Brinkman, W.-P. (2004). Informing Intelligent Environments: Creating Profiled User Interfaces. In E. van den Hoven, W. IJsselsteijn, G. Kortuem, K. van Laerhoven, I. McClelland, E. Perik, N. Romero, and B. de (Ed.) Adjunct Proceedings of EUSAI, (p. 15-17).

29. Website www.proskin.or g

30. Questions?