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Exploring Social Recommendations with Visual Diversity-Promoting Interfaces

Published: 09 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The beyond-relevance objectives of recommender systems have been drawing more and more attention. For example, a diversity-enhanced interface has been shown to associate positively with overall levels of user satisfaction. However, little is known about how users adopt diversity-enhanced interfaces to accomplish various real-world tasks. In this article, we present two attempts at creating a visual diversity-enhanced interface that presents recommendations beyond a simple ranked list. Our goal was to design a recommender system interface to help users explore the different relevance prospects of recommended items in parallel and to stress their diversity. Two within-subject user studies in the context of social recommendation at academic conferences were conducted to compare our visual interfaces. Results from our user study show that the visual interfaces significantly reduced the exploration efforts required for given tasks and helped users to perceive the recommendation diversity. We show that the users examined a diverse set of recommended items while experiencing an improvement in overall user satisfaction. Also, the users’ subjective evaluations show significant improvement in many user-centric metrics. Experiences are discussed that shed light on avenues for future interface designs.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
    ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems  Volume 10, Issue 1
    Special Issue on IUI 2018
    March 2020
    347 pages
    ISSN:2160-6455
    EISSN:2160-6463
    DOI:10.1145/3352585
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Publication History

    Published: 09 August 2019
    Accepted: 01 July 2018
    Revised: 01 July 2018
    Received: 01 May 2018
    Published in TIIS Volume 10, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Social recommendation
    2. diversification
    3. diversity-promoting interface
    4. user interface
    5. user-driven exploration

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