Towards the design of personalized adaptive user interfaces for smart TV viewers

Abstract

Smart TV is a lean-back and shared device with diverse viewership, cultural acceptance, interaction modalities, input/output characteristics, and contextual use. Researchers, developers, and vendors constantly add new features and functionalities to its user interface (UI) to get higher market shares. However, the current smart TV UIs are static and follow a one-size-fits-all approach, where adding new features makes it cluttered and complex with limited learnability, usability, and greater cognitive overload. Another issue is the limited support for adaptive UIs to customize these features, functions, and services as per user needs. This article fills these gaps in the literature by designing a framework of personalized adaptive UIs for smart TV users capable of changing the UI layout and structure per the user needs and contextual details. The framework was tested on an Android-based smart TV and evaluated using a real-world dataset and an empirical study involving 75 household members in a mixed-mode questionnaire-based survey. The results were analyzed using Cronbach alpha, Kendall's tau-b, and principal component factor analysis. It was observed that personalized adaptive UIs are perceived positively in terms of attitude, usability, user experience, accessibility, learnability, user satisfaction, intension to use, and reduced cognitive overload.