User Environments and Individuals: Experience with Adaptive Interface Agents

Abstract:

The traditional style of working with computers generally revolves around the computer being used as a tool, with individual users directly initiating operations and waiting for the results of them. A more recent paradigm of human-computer interaction, based on the indirect management of computing resources, is agent-based interaction. The idea of delegation plays a key part in this approach to computer-based work, which allows individuals to relinquish the routine, mechanistic parts of their everyday tasks, having them performed automatically instead. Adaptive interfaces combine elements of both these approaches, where the goal is to have the interface adapt to its users rather than the reverse. This paper addresses some of the issues arising from a practical software development process which aimed to support individuals using this style of interaction. This paper documents the development of a set of classes which implement an architecture for adaptive interfaces. These classes are intended to be used as part of larger user interface systems which are to exhibit adaptive behaviour. One approach to the implementation of an adaptive interface is to use a set of software “agents”– simple processes which effectively run “in the background”– to decompose the task of implementing the interface. These agents form part of a larger adaptive interface architecture, which in turn forms a component of the adaptive system.