A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus

Software applications continue to grow in terms of the number of features they offer, making personalization in-creasingly important. Research has shown that most users prefer the control afforded by an adaptable approach to personalization rather than a system-controlled adaptive approach. No study, however, has compared the efficiency of the two approaches. In a controlled lab study with 27 subjects we compared the measured and perceived effi-ciency of three menu conditions: static, adaptable and adap-tive. Each was implemented as a split menu, in which the top four items remained static, were adaptable by the sub-ject, or adapted according to the subject's frequently and recently used items. The static menu was found to be sig-nificantly faster than the adaptive menu, and the adaptable menu was found to be significantly faster than the adaptive menu under certain conditions. The majority of users pre-ferred the adaptable menu overall. Implications for inter-face design are discussed