Paper Reading #24: The Why UI

Comments:

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Comment2

Reference Information:

Title: The Why UI: Using Goal Networks to Improve User Interfaces

Authors: D. A. Smith, H. Lieberman

Presentation: IUI '10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary: This paper discusses the idea of integrating the user's goals into interfaces in order to provide users with better experience and results when using the interface. In the first part of their development they analyzed data from 43Things.com, a web site that gathers goals from users. The data is analyzed to determine the sub goals that the user might also want to consider in order to accomplish their goal. The second part of their work was to develop an application where users could indicate their goal and they would receive information about what other people did in order to accomplish their goals.

Discussion: The idea of analyzing the users goals in order to aid the user in accomplishing them is really interesting. However, I'm not sure in what kind of settings would this tool be of much help. The paper presents a scenario where the goal is to buy a house, thus the user obtains information about relaters. However, they do not present any data demonstrating the application's efficiency or appeal to users.