Adaptive user interfaces 6 Mar 2007

Jono DiCarlo has a nice little summary of the problems associated with "adaptive interfaces" over at Humanized. An adaptive interface is a UI that adapts to meet the needs of the user based upon his or her behaviour. If you've used Microsoft products you're already familiar with them - Office 2000 famously introduced "adaptive menus" (also known as "personalised menus") in an attempt to make its top-level (File, Edit, View...) menus appear shorter. These menus showed only the most popular items and hid those that were seldom-used. The idea was that you'd eventually have a fully-tuned, auto-customised UI that would only show you what you needed to use.

Sounds like a good idea right?

Wrong!

As DiCarlo points out, "The idea hasn't worked out so well in practice. Many users turn off adaptive menus in Office because they find the feature extremely frustrating. Even Microsoft's own designers have admitted that adaptive menus didn't work out the way they hoped. The feature has been removed quietly from the latest versions of Microsoft Office...What was the problem? Adaptive interfaces have several drawbacks, and the big one is that they're intrinsically hard to learn. If you're trying to learn an adaptive interface, you have to chase after a moving target: 'Where did that menu item go? It was here yesterday...'. Even a user experienced with the interface will have a hard time habituating to it, since the locations of commands are not consistent. It's an interface that moves in the night."