Home - Projects - SUPPLE
Overview
Supple uses decision-theoretic optimization to automatically generate user interfaces adapted to a person's abilities, devices, preferences, and tasks. In particular, SUPPLE can generate user interfaces for people with motor and vision impairments and the results of our laboratory experiments show that these automatically generated, ability-based user interfaces significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of users with motor impairments compared to manufacturers' default interfaces
To quickly learn more about the project, see the video or read our AAAI '08 paper summarizing the project.
Motivation
Today's user interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied user, who has typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, who is sitting in a stable warm environment, and who is using a typical set of input and output devices. Any deviation from these assumptions (for example, hand tremor due to aging, low vision, riding on a jostling bus, trying to use a laser pointer to control a mouse cursor, or trying to access an application from a mobile device), may drastically hamper users' effectiveness--not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between users' situation and the assumptions underlying the user interface design.
Why generate user interfaces automatically?
We argue that interfaces should be personalized to better suit the contexts of individual users. Many personalized interfaces are needed because of the myriad of distinct individuals, each with his or her own abilities, preferences, devices and needs. Therefore, traditional manual interface design and engineering will not scale to such a broad range of potential contexts and people. A different approach is needed. We believe that automatically generated user interfaces, which are adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities, can improve people's satisfaction and performance compared to traditional manually designed "one size fits all" interfaces.
Results so far
As part of the SUPPLE project, we have developed three systems to enable a broad range of personalized adaptive interfaces: SUPPLE itself, which uses decision-theoretic optimization to automatically generate user interfaces adapted to a person's device and usage; ARNAULD, which allows optimization-based systems to be adapted to users' preferences; and the ABILITY MODELER, which performs a one-time assessment of a person's motor abilities and then automatically builds a model of those abilities, which SUPPLE uses to automatically generate user interfaces adapted to that user's abilities. The results of our laboratory experiments show that these automatically generated, ability-based user interfaces significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of users with motor impairments compared to manufacturers' defaults. We also provide the first characterization of the design space of adaptive graphical user interfaces, and demonstrate how such interfaces can significantly improve the quality and efficiency of daily interactions for typical users.
Can I have it?
SUPPLE is still a research prototype. We do hope to create a public version of the system within the next couple of years. You should expect to see it deployed on the web first, giving people personalized access to web-based applications such as email, social networking, and others.
A 2005 version of SUPPLE (the basic interface generation engine) is available for download. We haven't packaged the latest version of the code for distribution yet.
Contributors
The projects was developed by Krzysztof Gajos,
Daniel Weld (UW CSE), and
Jacob Wobbrock (UW iSchool) with contributions from David Christianson, Kiera Henning, Raphael Hoffmann, Jing Jing Long, and Anthony Wu.
Selected Media Mentions
Pimp My Program a TV spot by Ivanhoe Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science. March, 2009
Special GUI for Your Eyes Only by Anuradha Menon, The Future of Things. November 24, 2008.
An interface for your eyes only by Lee Bruno, The Guardian. August 28, 2008.
Tweaking user interfaces to match abilities, disabilities by Yun Xie, ArsTechnica. July 17, 2008
Every User Deserves a Personalized Interface by Maria José Viñas, The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 16, 2008
For your eyes only: Custom interfaces make computer clicking faster, easier Press Release by Hannah Hickey, UW News Office. July 15, 2008.
Publications
Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Daniel S. Weld, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. Automatically generating personalized user interfaces with Supple. Artificial Intelligence, 174:910-950, 2010.
[Abstract, BibTeX, etc.]
Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Daniel S. Weld. Improving the performance of motor-impaired users with automatically-generated, ability-based interfaces. In CHI '08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1257-1266, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
Best Paper Award
[Abstract, BibTeX, Video, etc.]
Krzysztof Z. Gajos. Automatically Generating Personalized User Interfaces. PhD thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 2008.
[Abstract, BibTeX, etc.]
Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Daniel S. Weld, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. Decision-Theoretic User Interface Generation. In AAAI'08, pages 1532-1536. AAAI Press, 2008.
[Abstract, BibTeX, etc.]
Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Daniel S. Weld. Automatically generating user interfaces adapted to users' motor and vision capabilities. In UIST '07: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 231-240, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.
[Abstract, BibTeX, Slides, Video, etc.]
Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Jing J. Long, and Daniel S. Weld. Automatically generating custom user interfaces for users with physical disabilities. In Assets '06: Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, pages 243-244, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press.
Krzysztof Gajos, David Christianson, Raphael Hoffmann, Tal Shaked, Kiera Henning, Jing J. Long, and Daniel S. Weld. Fast and Robust Interface Generation for Ubiquitous Applications. In UbiComp 2005: Ubiquitous Computing, volume 3660 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 37-55, Berlin / Heidelberg, 2005. Springer.
[Abstract, BibTeX, Slides, etc.]
Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. Preference elicitation for interface optimization. In UIST '05: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 173-182, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press.
[Abstract, BibTeX, Slides, etc.]
Krzysztof Gajos, Anthony Wu, and Daniel S. Weld. Cross-Device Consistency in Automatically Generated User Interfaces. In Proceedings of Workshop on Multi-User and Ubiquitous User Interfaces (MU3I'05), 2005.
Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. SUPPLE: automatically generating user interfaces. In IUI '04: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interface, pages 93-100, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press.
[Abstract, BibTeX, etc.]
Krzysztof Gajos, Raphael Hoffmann, and Daniel S. Weld. Improving User Interface Personalization. In Supplementary Proceedings of UIST'04, Santa Fe, NM, 2004.
Daniel S. Weld, Corin Anderson, Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Krzysztof Gajos, Tessa Lau, and Steve Wolfman. Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces. In IJCAI03, Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003. Invited paper.
[Abstract, BibTeX, etc.]
This page was last modified on March 25, 2022.
