Decision making in intelligent user interfaces

Intelligent user interfaces are characterised by their capability to adapt at run-time and make several communication decisions concerning ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ to communicate, through a certain adaptation strategy. In this paper, we present a methodological approach to assist this decision making process, which is btyed on a clear separation of the important attributes that characterise the adaptation strategy, namely the adaptation determinants, constituents, goals and rules. Based on this separation, we also present a methodological approach for the formulation of adaptation rules, which utilises techniques from the domain of multiple criteria decision making. It is argued that, following the proposed approach, the adaptation strategy can be easily customised to the requirements of different application domains and user groups, and can be re-used with minor modifications in different applications. As a result, developers of intelligent user interfaces can be significantly assisted, and users can be empowered to exploit the benefits of intelligent interfaces.