Predicting Human Performance in Vertical Menu Selection Using Deep Learning
This work addresses the need for designers and developers to estimate interface performance without user testing, though it is incremental as it applies deep learning to an existing domain.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting human performance in vertical menu selection tasks using a deep neural network, achieving significant improvements over previous methods on both desktop and smartphone datasets.
Predicting human performance in interaction tasks allows designers or developers to understand the expected performance of a target interface without actually testing it with real users. In this work, we present a deep neural net to model and predict human performance in performing a sequence of UI tasks. In particular, we focus on a dominant class of tasks, i.e., target selection from a vertical list or menu. We experimented with our deep neural net using a public dataset collected from a desktop laboratory environment and a dataset collected from hundreds of touchscreen smartphone users via crowdsourcing. Our model significantly outperformed previous methods on these datasets. Importantly, our method, as a deep model, can easily incorporate additional UI attributes such as visual appearance and content semantics without changing model architectures. By understanding about how a deep learning model learns from human behaviors, our approach can be seen as a vehicle to discover new patterns about human behaviors to advance analytical modeling.