Many interfaces attempt to assist users by offering suggestions, predicting actions, or correcting user input. Although these attempts may often be beneficial, they will occasionally fail, and prior research from psychology and behavioral economics on loss aversion suggests that such failures may have an overweighted impact on subjective preferences. To better understand the relationship between interface outcomes and subjective preferences, we adapted to interaction a model from behavioral economics describing reference-dependent preferences. Two experiments examined our model’s predictions: both involved word-snapping interface assistance during text selection, with subjects choosing whether they preferred unassisted text selection (no snapping) or assisted text selection (snapping). In Experiment 1, the word-snapping feature could be disabled when it was unhelpful by backtracking the selection, which required progress losses in terms of target characters selected. In Experiment 2, word-snapping could be disabled by pressing a modifier key and waiting for an animation to complete, without need for the loss of target characters. Time and error performance with both experimental methods were comparable. The model predicts an aversion to progress losses in Experiment 1 that should be neutralized in Experiment 2, and the results of both experiments conformed to these predictions. We discuss the implications of the model as a platform for understanding user preferences more broadly, especially when considering interfaces that risk periodically failing to meet user expectations.

许多界面试图通过提供建议，预测动作或纠正用户输入来帮助用户。尽管这些尝试通常可能是有益的，但它们有时会失败，心理学和行为经济学对损失厌恶的先前研究表明，此类失败可能对主观偏好产生过重的影响。为了更好地理解界面结果与主观偏好之间的关系，我们采用行为经济学的模型来交互，该模型描述了参考依赖偏好。有两个实验检查了我们模型的预测：两个都涉及文本选择过程中的单词捕捉界面帮助，对象选择他们是喜欢无辅助的文本选择（无捕捉）还是辅助的文本选择（捕捉）。在实验1中，可以通过回溯选择来禁用单词捕捉功能（如果该功能无用），这就要求在选择目标字符方面损失进度。在实验2中，可以通过按下修饰键并等待动画完成来禁用单词捕捉功能，而无需丢失目标字符。两种实验方法的时间和错误表现均相当。该模型预测对实验1中进度损失的厌恶，应在实验2中予以抵消，并且两个实验的结果均符合这些预测。