Paper Reading #17 - The Why UI: Using Goal Networks to Improve User Interfaces

Comments

Chris

Shena

Reference

The Why UI: Using Goal Networks to Improve User Interfaces

Dustin A. Smith, Henry Lieberman

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

This paper claimed that modeling user goals could improve user interfaces. The argument centers around the idea that once an application has knowledge of a user’s intentions it can perform some automated planning or tasks through the construction of a goal network. The goal network supports concepts like the location of the goal, duration to achieve, and subgoals. Goal libraries are also used to examine human-level goals. The paper accomplished this by parsing data from a website where people share their goals, achievements, and thoughts about others’ goals. An implementation in the form of a to-do list application was created.

Analysis

This paper was not very well focused. I felt a lot of conceptual talk about goals and how they could be used to augment interfaces was present at the beginning, but the implementation seemed random and unrelated. I agree strongly that recognizing a human’s goal could greatly serve to improve experiences, but I am uncertain how parsing a database of people’s goals illustrates this. The implementation seemed to just basically provide popular subgoals associated with an entered goal. I may be missing something here, but I am generally unclear as to the direction of this research.