Please no. The actual users using an account may change over time (and rather frequently), e.g. in a family situation.
Also, in general, I like my systems to be predictable, and I prefer if they don't try to be smart.
> Please no.
Indeed, that's the second coming of Office 2000's "adaptive menus". It was an awful idea then, it's an awful idea now.
Even if the account has a single unchanging user and the feature actually works correctly and it doesn't impair initial discoverability, changes in software behaviour will break muscle memory and at least annoy.
I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it.
Naturally, there appears to be no way to override and say, "just show ALL my folders ALL the time! If I didn't want to see a folder, I'd delete it!"
But I don't expect a lot from Google, which seemly has zero UX experts and I'm not even 100% sure its products are developed by human beings. (See: Buzz, Wave.)
This is a horrible feature. I was a Netflix subscriber for years (an early adopter in the mail-order DVD days), and after weeks of fiddling and trying to disable this mis-feature, I finally unsubscribed because of it.
The ribbon is not fundamentally adaptive, IIRC the initial Office 2007 implementation was neither adaptive nor customisable, although it was partially contextual (some ribbon tabs would only appear when they made sense e.g. formatting when selecting text or cells)
Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you!
I think we're hitting a critical mass of UX, where we're trying to dumbly pre-suppose behavior. There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning), but blanketing behaviors for all users is just downright stupid.