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CHAPTER 10
Usability Evaluation
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Two studies of the generated interfaces were conducted to examine the usability of interfaces
generated by the PUC. The first study compared the generated interfaces to existing humandesigned interfaces for the same functionality, with the hypothesis that interface quality is no
longer a limiting factor for automatically generated interfaces. The results were that users of
the automatically generated interfaces were twice as fast and four times more successful than
users of the existing interfaces for a set of eight independent tasks with varying difficulty.
The second study examined the PUC’s algorithms for automatically generating interfaces
that are consistent with the user’s previous experience (see Chapters 6 and 8). The hypothesis
was that automatically generated interfaces can provide benefits beyond those shown in the
first study through user customizations that would be impractical for human designers to
provide. In this study, users were first trained on the same eight tasks from the first study
using one interface. After users could successfully perform these tasks, they were asked to perform the same tasks on a second, different, interface with similar functionality. The results
showed that users were twice as fast when the second interface is generated by the PUC to be
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The work in this chapter was recently submitted for publication as Jeffrey Nichols, Duen Horng Chau, and Brad A.
Myers. “Demonstrating the Viability of Automatically Generated User Interfaces,” Submitted for Publication.
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