Towards customized user interface skins: investigating user personality and skin colour

Skinning technology allows applications to have multiple appearances, giving designers the ability to customize a user interface for specific user groups. For effective customisation, designers need to (i) segment their user population, and (ii) understand the relationship between the segmentation and the dimensions in which an application can be skinned. This paper presents two exploratory pilot studies that focus on user personality as a way to segment a user group, and colour as a skinning dimension. Instead of the traditional questionnaire style personality inventories, the study looks at user interaction behaviour as a way to determine the user personality. In the first study, 16 participants were asked to use an application for 5 days and to complete the IPIP-NEO personality inventories. Analysis of the recorded interaction behaviour and the participants’ personality, revealed significant correlations between behavioural measures such as time between two consecutive user actions, or the number of user actions made, and personality traits such as extraversion, and conscientiousness. A second pilot study asked 20 participants also to complete the personality inventory and to indicate their preferences for 5 colour-skins of two applications. The results revealed significant correlations between personality traits and skin colour such as blue and extraversion, but also between black and imagination. These early findings suggest that designers could develop customized skins based on users’ behaviour.

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