The Appropriate research project studies in depth human factors related to software appropriation, and specifically the characteristics of tailoring activities with interactive applications and their effects on end users’ workflows. It is fully funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) for 4 years under the ID ANR-25-CE33-5375 starting in March 2026.

Summary #

Interactive systems aim to support a large audience of end-users to achieve stereotypical tasks. They, however, often lack means to tailor their features and functionalities to accommodate for personal needs and preferences. This pushes end-users to make significant efforts to learn and adapt to the systems’ logic, and in the worst cases, to abandon them. This project focuses on the personalization and automation of interactive systems, such as changing the command layout in a graphical interface or setting email filters. We want to study interactive means to promote such tailoring tasks by raising awareness of possibilities with contextual information, and supporting engagement in simple or complex tailoring tasks based on the impact and duration of the targeted modifications. Our goals are to:

1. characterize tailoring tasks to identify their types and what stages they consist in
2. study timely signifiers to promote tailoring possibilities in the context of significant events
3. study the benefits and limitations of tailoring actions with regard to their duration and the significance of their outcomes, and
4. investigate interactive means to facilitate testing and undoing effects of tailoring actions. The expected contributions of this work are general empirical findings uncovered through user studies on how humans tailor and appropriate interactive systems, general design guidelines to promote and facilitate tailoring various interactive applications, and proofs-of-concept implementing these guidelines to demonstrate their usefulness.

Jobs #

Currently looking for candidates for the following positions and topics:

• One Masters’ intern on the Impact of Switching Spatial Configurations on Learning Software Feature - starting March 2026 - proposal
• One PhD on Promoting Tailoring Possibilities and Evaluating their Impact - starting March 2026 to November 2026 - proposal
• One Postdocs on Characterizing Tailoring Tasks and their Workflow(s) - starting March 2026 to November 2026 - proposal

Contact #

Bruno Fruchard Permanent researcher LOKI team at the Inria center of the University of Lille bruno.fruchard@inria.fr