Human-Centred Web Adaptation and Personalization by Panagiotis Germanakos & Marios Belk

Author:Panagiotis Germanakos & Marios Belk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

But, even if this is the case, and in the end personalization is the key to more efficient interactions and a satisfactory experience, still one undeniable issue is when, to what extent and how users would actually benefit? Additional research should focus even more on measuring the added value for the end-users and their unique characteristics, instead of merely developing advanced personalization and user modeling techniques. Individuals are certainly different from each other, but which would be the underlying theories that could guide research endeavors in producing measurable gains? A first approach would be to identify the levels in which individuals demonstrate a considerable divergence, such as demographics, social, mental abilities, personality, goals, needs, and experience, and to build a cohesive user model by including characteristics that could be proven of importance in affecting behavior and performance. Probably, this could be achieved only by conducting extensive empirical work, driven by grounded psychological and sociological theories, and by gradually developing an interdisciplinary framework that would bridge technical possibilities with human factors.

To that end, considering in parallel the main functionalities of adaptive hypermedia, effective personalization of Web content involves two important challenges: (i) Accurately model and represent user information that is deemed as essential and useful for the adaptation process; and (ii) model any hypermedia content in a way that would enable efficient and effective navigation and presentation as a result of the adaptation process. In a more technical view, the challenge is to study and design structures of meta-data (i.e., semantics) at the provider level, aiming to construct a Web-based adaptation mechanism that will serve as an automatic filter adapting the distributed hypermedia content based on the user model. Semantics employ specialized approaches and techniques for alleviating difficulties and constraints imposed by the World Wide Web and contribute to the whole adaptation process with machine-understandable representation of user models and Web content.

In this context, we introduce the notion of individual differences as a core element of the abovementioned research directions, focusing mainly on users’ cognitive and emotional characteristics. In particular, human-computer interactions within interactive systems are in principal tasks that embrace perception, recognition, recalling and reasoning. Taken into consideration the diversity of humans in cognitive processing styles and abilities, and the dynamicity of their emotions as seen in Chap. 2 and Sect. 3.​5 (Riding and Cheema 1991; Kozhevnikov 2007; Demetriou et al. 2013), when creating adaption and personalization content and functionality of interactive systems, could provide a promising alternative to current state-of-the-art practices. The aim is to support the users’ efficiency and effectiveness of processing information as well as decrease cognitive load, and eventually improve the user experience.

The basis of such an approach lies in an initial understanding of how such intrinsic human factors affect user interactions in specific domains and contexts of use and investigate the feasibility and efficacy of incorporating them in the user model and accordingly adapt the content and functionality of the system. In particular, the first steps of any similar approach is to initially design and

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