Exploring adverse effects of adaptive voice menu

Menus are one of the effective user interfaces which is used for navigation in many systems like desktop applications, voice system, etc. Placement of each menu item in the menu tree is known as menu configuration. Deciding optimal configuration in a menu based system is a challenging task. This task to decide the optimal configuration dynamically can be done through adaptive interfaces. Adaptive interfaces play significant role when optimality varies with time. However, the negative impacts of adaptive interfaces on the users familiar with the system discourage its use. There is a need to have separate design for handling users familiar and unfamiliar with the system. In this work, we study the adverse effect of adaptive voice menu on the experienced users. We also propose strategies to reduce the adverse effect of adaptivity. We design and deploy a menu based voice system to conduct a control experiment to evaluate proposed strategies. The proposed strategies try to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar users and takes remedial steps to suppress the adverse effect of adaptive interfaces for familiar users.