The paper “Citizen-Led Personalization of User Interfaces: Investigating How People Customize Interfaces for Themselves and Others”, authored by LASIGE PhD student Sérgio Alves and integrated member Tiago Guerreiro, in collaboration with Kyle Montague from Northumbria University’s NorSC Lab, was published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.

This paper investigates a novel approach to user interface (UI) personalization — community-based UI personalization. The authors report on a two-week field deployment of GitUI, a browser extension that enabled nine participants to freely customize web interfaces and to create or respond to customization assistance requests from other users.

Results revealed people’s interest in a community-based model of UI personalization, where users actively collaborate and support one another in creating alternative layouts for the interfaces they use. The study also highlights the need for future tools that help users identify and reflect on personalization opportunities in their digital environments.

The paper is available here.