Year: 2002
Type: dissertation
Abstract: A series of quantitative and qualitative investigations were performed in the course of the PhD to assess the psychological impact of the use of personalised user interfaces.The research involved three parts: (1) controlled web-based experiments investigating the interaction of personalisation and personification, i.e., the degree to which the interface presents itself as a human being; (2) qualitative studies assessing personalisation of appearance and personalised recommendations; (3) further quantitative studies investigating the findings from Part 2.Part 1 involved two experiments where the participants were asked to interact with a fictional on line bank incorporating personalisation and personification.The experiments led to the conclusion that under some circumstances, the incorporation of personalisation features in a web-based electronic service can have beneficial user effects.It may be that in certain circumstances personalisation should be accompanied by personification to enable these effects.The qualities on which personalisation and personification may have a positive impact include at least mental workload, engagement, trust, and emotional involvement.Rather than focusing on the combined effects of a range of personalisation features, Part 2 studied individual personalisation features.Discussion groups were run to investigate the user implications of personalisation of appearance and personalised recommendations.Grounded theory analysis of the transcripts yielded theories on these two technologies.In the former theory, Dispositions lead to Personalisation Behaviour, which in turn has Effects on the user.The latter highlights factors that affect an individual's disposition to use personalised information.The Theory of Personalisation of Appearance (TPA) was further developed and validated using two qualitative follow-up studies.In Part 3, a questionnaire and an experiment were performed to validate the structure of the TP A. In the questionnaire study, consistent with the TP A, the main elements of the TP A correlated positively with each other.The study also resulted in modifying the supercategories grouping the Effects.The experiment, although exploratory, found support for the notion that Personalisation Behaviour causes Effects.Both of the validation studies suggested that the TP A provides an accurate description of the phenomenon it aims to describe.
Author: Jan Blom
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2887457683