Software Engineering Aspects of an Intelligent User Interface based on Multi Criteria Decision Making

Decision making theories have been proved to be very successful for evaluating the users’ interests and preferences in Intelligent User Interfaces (IUIs). However, their application and incorporation in the reasoning of an IUI requires empirical studies throughout the software life-cycle that lead to requirements analysis and specification, important design decisions and evaluation of the resulting IUI. This paper presents a life-cycle model of how a decision making theory can be applied effectively in an IUI and gives detailed information about the experiments conducted. More specifically, the Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) model has been used as a theory test bed and has been applied in an IUI that is called MBIFM. MBIFM is a file manipulation system that works in a similar way as Windows/NT Explorer. However, the system constantly reasons about every user’s action and provides spontaneous advice, in case this is considered necessary.