Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!trillium.waterloo.edu!azieba
From: azieba@trillium.waterloo.edu (Warren Baird)
Subject: Re: adaptive user interfaces
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.190956.11212@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@watdragon.waterloo.edu (News Owner)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <1991Jun12.182221.10179@cs.sfu.ca> <SVEN.91Jun16141303@laverne.cs.widener.edu> <1991Jun16.205355.12316@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1991 19:09:56 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <1991Jun16.205355.12316@psych.toronto.edu> dsy@psych.toronto.edu (Desiree Sy) writes:
>
>Microsoft has done a little work on this. Users can adjust their
>menus and keystroke combinations in Word 4.0. I love this feature,
>and would be delighted if more applications would incorporate it.

Sun's old UI, SunView, provided a lot of user definable parameters.
You can tell the UI where and how big you want your scrollbars, where
your icons go when you close them, and many other things.  It also
provides a graphical defaults editor to change and save these
parameters.  OpenWindows, Sun's new UI, doesn't seem to provide quite
the same level of flexibility (although I admit that I haven't used it
nearly as much as I have SunView).

I certainly agree that user interfaces should allow the user to
customize them, but I'm not sure if AI is the way to go.  It seems to
me that for most current interfaces, a list of parameters would be
sufficent, perhaps with a pretty/intellegent interface.

Warren

>
>-desiree
>


