Exploring Individual Differences in How People Use Adaptive User Interfaces

Past work, including ours, has shown that well-designed adaptive user interfaces can substantially improve people's performance and that people prefer those interfaces to the standard one-size-fits-all designs. But do all people benefit from adaptive user interfaces equally, or are some systematic differences causing some people to reap greater benefit than others. Our first study, which utilized the results from the Multitasking Test on Lab in the Wild has shown that people with high need for cognition utilize the adaptive feature fo adaptive user interfaces much more than those with low need for cognition. Also, introverts utilize the adaptive interface more than extroverts.