Theory-grounded user modeling for personalized HCI

Personalized systems are systems that adapt themselves to meet the inferred needs of individual users. The majority of personalized systems mainly rely on data describing how users interacted with these systems. A common approach is to use historical data to predict users' future needs, preferences and behavior to subsequently adapt the system to cater to these predictions. However, this adaptation is often done without leveraging the theoretical understanding between behavior and user traits that can be used to characterize individual users or the relationship between user traits and needs that can be used to adapt the system. Adopting a more theoretical perspective can benefit personalization in three ways: (i) relying on theory can reduce the amount of data required to train compared to a purely data-driven system, (ii) interpreting the outcomes of data-driven analysis (such as predictive models) from a theoretical perspective can expand our knowledge about users and (iii) provide means for explanations and transparency. However, in order to incorporate theoretical knowledge in personalization a number of obstacles need to be faced. In this chapter, we review literature that taps into aspects of (i) psychological models from traditional psychological theory that can be used in personalization, (ii) relationships between psychological models and online behavior, (iii) automated inference of psychological models from data, and (iv) how to incorporate psychological models in personalized systems. Finally, we propose a step-by-step approach on how to design personalized systems that take users' traits into account.