Proficiency-Aware Systems: Adapting to the User's Skills and Expertise

Abstract

Everyday lives become increasingly reliant to digitally enhanced artifacts. Users expect that devices are easy to use. For technologies deployed in public spaces and for shared devices adaptation to the user is a key to achieve this. In this paper, we introduce the concept of proficiency-aware systems, that can dynamically adapt to the users' skills and expertise. Proficiency-aware systems have means to detect the users' proficiency relevant to the task and can adapt the user interface and the content accordingly. Such adaptation can be done locally and does not require to know the user, hence preserving the privacy while providing a customized user experience. Besides the definition, we elaborate on the idea by outlining a framework, describe requirements, and point to examples of proficiency-aware systems. The research challenge is in ubiquitous sensing techniques to infer users' proficiencies and to provide appropriate adaptations. We envision that for computing systems in public spaces this idea can lead to new interaction paradigms.