A Comparison of System-Controlled and User-Controlled Personalization Approaches

Personalizing interactive systems including games increases their effectiveness. This paper explores and compares two main approaches to personalization: system-controlled and user-controlled adaptation. The results of large-scale exploratory studies of 1768 users show that both techniques to personalizing systems share seven common strengths of increasing users' perception of a system's relevance, usefulness, interactivity, ease of use, credibility and trust, and also increases users' self-efficacy. The results also reveal some unique strengths and weaknesses peculiar to each of the approaches that designers should take into consideration when deciding on a suitable adaptation technique to use in personalizing their systems. Users prefer system- over user-controlled adaptation.