Prediction of Users' Learning Curves for Adaptation while Using an Information Visualization

Abstract

User performance and satisfaction when working with an interface is influenced by how quickly the user can acquire the skills necessary to work with the interface through practice. Learning curves are mathematical models that can represent a user's skill acquisition ability through parameters that describe the user's initial expertise as well as her learning rate. This information could be used by an interface to provide adaptive support to users who may otherwise be slow in learning the necessary skills. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of predicting in real time a user's learning curve when working with ValueChart, an interactive visualization for decision making. Our models leverage various data sources (a user's gaze behavior, pupil dilation, cognitive abilities), and we show that they outperform a baseline that leverages only knowledge on user task performance so far. We also show that the best performing model achieves good accuracies in predicting users' learning curves even after observing users' performance only on a few tasks. These results are promising toward the design of user-adaptive visualizations that can dynamically support a user in acquiring the necessary skills to complete visual tasks.