Designing for Adaptivity: Challenges and Guidelines for Adaptive User Interface Design

Abstract

Designing Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) challenges designers. Despite existing research, recommendations and guidelines for AUI design are dispersed across multiple studies. The present dissertation aims to identify the challenges designers encounter when designing AUIs and address them by consolidating a set of design guidelines for AUI design. The study began with a systematization of the challenges suggested in the literature. Afterward, a qualitative research approach involving interviews with designers with experience in AUI design enabled the identification of challenges emerging in practice. The triangulation of the challenges identified in the literature and in the interviews revealed that challenges emerge at all stages of the design process. Considering that design guidelines guide designers to apply design principles, a set of AUI design guidelines was consolidated from the recommendations of multiple authors in literature to assist designers overcome challenges stemming from AUIs inherent breach of design principles. The guidelines were tested and evaluated in a workshop with interaction designers. The results suggest that the proposed AUI design guidelines can assist designers in AUI design and have enabled their revision and iteration. Therefore, this study contributes to the field of AUI design by identifying the challenges designers encounter when designing AUIs and providing a set of guidelines for AUI design.