Towards More Individualized Interfaces: Automating the assessment of computer literacy

Computer Literacy is an important predictor for how proficient a person is in its interaction with computers, which can determine whether a person is motivated and able to use specific software. Measuring Computer Literacy or its constituent elements (Skills, Attitude, Knowledge and Experience) has traditionally been done using questionnaires. This method has several limitations: it is effort-intensive for subjects, subject to cognitive biases, and constitutes only a snapshot of a person’s actual Computer Literacy. This limits the usefulness of Computer Literacy as a factor in persuasive systems design. In this paper, we describe an experiment to test the design of a system that extracts elements of Computer Literacy based on observation of human-computer interaction. This new method has the potential to enable the use of Computer Literacy in software design by addressing some of the barriers to its use”in the wild”, opening up new possibilities for tailored and adaptive systems