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by daotoad 2379 days ago
Automatically changing interfaces are terrible.

Static menus are faster that magically changing menus. People want to know where to click to do a thing.

User customizable menus can be faster (when used well) than static menus.

Here's a study: http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~tcan/se705/Schedule/assignment...

IMO, you'd get more mileage out of a menu with "Frequently used commands" that you can lock items into than with an AI rearranging stuff. And the algorithm is much simpler.

The hard part in UI is discoverability not repeatability. We would be wise to develop an easy to use workflow for finding commands based on what the user wants to do. Natural language processing could help here. Find a command: user types "How do I draw a box around some text". The search results should show where to find each command in nested menus, and be able to play an animated workflow example. An AI solution could help a user sift through a result set and find the choice that best matches their needs (for the box example, one way to add a box would be to turn on a border for a given paragraph, another way to get a box would be to add a free-form vector rectangle, positioned on the page).