An assessment of human factors in adaptive hypermedia environments

Abstract

The plethora of information and services as well as the complicated nature of most Web structures intensify the navigational difficulties that arise when users navigate their way through this large information space. Personalized services that are highly sensitive to the immediate environment and the goals of the user can alleviate the orientation and presentation difficulties experienced by the relatively diverse user population. User profiles serves as the main component of most Web personalization systems. Main scope of this chapter is to present the various techniques employed by such systems with regards to user profiles extraction and introduce a comprehensive user profile, which includes User Perceptual Preference Characteristics. It further analyzes the main intrinsic users' characteristics like visual, cognitive, and emotional processing parameters incorporated as well as the "traditional" user profile characteristics that together tend to give the most optimized personalization outcome. It finally overviews a Web adaptation and personalization system and presents evaluation results that further support the importance of human factors in the information space. © 2009, IGI Global.