Cognitive and Affective UI for Enhanced Usability

Abstract

Dynamic working conditions along with the user’s physical and emotional state have significant impact upon the usability and security of the system. As applications continue to provide increasingly sophisticated and complex functionality coupled with the widespread deployment of smart phones and tablets, critical information is at the fingertips of users. This level of accessibility substantially increases the possibilities of cyber security breaches. The impact of usability on reliability and security of the system are well understood, but what is not addressed is the impact of changing environment and cognitive load on the usability of the system. In this paper, we present the framework that constantly determines the user’s affective state, cognitive load, and context information and makes real-time adaptations to the User Interface to enhance the usability and security of the system. The framework can operate in a multi or single-mode configuration. The multi-mode configuration considers all factors before making a decision, whereas the single-mode automatically learns to use only the available information.

Keywords: Cognitive and Context-Aware User Interfaces, Cognitive Load, Affective States, Usability, Reliability

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100588