On the Importance of Spatial Perception for the Design of Adaptive User Interfaces

Automatically changing interfaces, such as Adaptive User Interfaces, are employed in state of the art software products, applications for mobile devices and web sites. While previous work has reported that some adaptive approaches to user interfaces achieve a low user satisfaction score, it has also been shown that they obtain a higher user performance score when compared with their static equivalent. This phenomenon has not been further investigated by previous research. The motivation of this paper is to further investigate this issue and consequently propose design principles for automatically changing interfaces. This is achieved by a fourfold contribution: a literature review of the current state of the art research of interface adaptation methods, the identification of the importance of spatial properties of interface elements (such as position, orientation and size) based on the review, a second literature review of human capabilities and limits that affect the perception and interpretation of spatial changes and lastly design principles for Adaptive User Interfaces are proposed that are derived based on the two literature reviews.