Adaptive Path Blog

Stephen Anderson, Sabre
What he’s not talking about: “Hey what happened to my application!”, smart menus, adaptive content, neural networks, AI, social mobs, etc.

Instead talking about micro-changes in the interface itself. These are scripted adaptations (”Choose your own adventure” style).

It’s not that difficult to create personalized UIs. IF THEN ELSE statements.

What if…there was natural language recognition? (”I’m attaching a document…” brings up a form field to attach a document)

What if…my location was known and the UI changed in response?

What if…shipping costs were automatically calculated for me?

What if…drop down menus were sorted by most clicked on? What if the UI element switched based on the amount of data? Intelligent listing.

What if…we noticed that a user was missing the button, we could increase the button size?

What if…the prominence of help links changed over time?

What data elements are less important after time or activity? How does information relevance change over time?

What if…we moved the placement of text based on the amount of text?

What if…we had time-based layouts (changing the information design based on likely context)?

Make transitions to a radically new release easier for current users?

What if…we collapsed data after the 50th time using it?

Why not…have fixed areas and areas that are flexible?

What if…we changed the help text/labels based on audience?

What if…the navigation label changed based on geography?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Conference Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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