A Taxonomy of User Behavior Model (UBM) Tools for UI Design and User Research.

The engineering of user interfaces (UIs) increasingly relies on software tools that aid in ideation, design, evaluation, etc., but involve no real users. Particularly, user behavior models (UBMs) bear the potential to improve human-centered design processes, but their adoption in practice remains low. In this paper, we present a taxonomy for UBM tools that organizes and structures them along 7 dimensions – supported job, degree of automation, focus, interface data input, user data input, output of tool, and target interface platform. We also conduct an initial evaluation with 61 existing tools, providing insights into the current state of the field. Notably, none of the investigated tools work with user characteristics or reference interfaces as input, although this would appear very practical for real projects. Our results could support UI/UX researchers and digital design practitioners in searching for the tools and further enhancing them. Ultimately, our work represents a step toward understanding and overcoming the low adoption rate of ML-based UBM tools in the industry.