Capturing essential intrinsic user behaviour values for the design of comprehensive web-based personalized environments

Abstract

Advances in Web-based oriented technologies and services are taking place with a considerable speed around the world. As communications and IT usage become an integral part of many people's lives and the available products and services become more varied and sophisticated, users expect to be able to personalize a service to meet their individual needs and preferences. Due to the heterogeneous users' needs and requirements, user modeling could be considered as a successful step towards the identification of users' preferences. However, could user profiling nowadays be considered complete enough? Are all the vital parameters of users' characteristics are taken into account in order for the Web-based systems to provide them with the most user-centric result? This paper introduces a comprehensive user profiling, incorporating the User Perceptual Preference Characteristics, that serves as the core element for filtering Web-based raw content. It further analyzes the main intrinsic users' characteristics like visual, cognitive, and emotional processing parameters as well as the "traditional" user profiling characteristics that together tend to give the most optimized, adapted and personalized result. It finally presents initial experimental results applied on the Educational field based on the abovementioned notions. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.