Incorporating Human Factors in the Development of Context-Aware Personalized Applications: The Next Generation of Intelligent User Interfaces

Abstract

The notion of context in context-aware applications is not merely an issue of external situational circumstances or device/channel properties, but it could also refer to a wide array of user characteristics that have an effect throughout users’ interactions with a system. Human factors such as cognitive traits and current state, from a psychological point of view, are undoubtedly significant in the shaping of the perceived and objective quality of interactions with a system, and by defining context in that sense, personalization may as well become an essential function of context aware applications. The research that is presented in this chapter focuses on identifying human factors that relate to users’ performance in Web applications that involve information processing, and a framework of personalization rules that are expected to increase users’ performance is depicted. The environments that empirical results were derived from were both learning and commercial; in the case of E-Learning personalization was beneficial, while the interaction with a commercial site needs to be further investigated due to the implicit character of information processing in the Web.