A visual interface for critiquing-based recommender systems

  • Authors:
  • Jiyong Zhang;Nicolas Jones;Pearl Pu

  • Affiliations:
  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Critiquing-based recommender systems provide an efficient way for users to navigate through complex product spaces even if they are not familiar with the domain details in e-commerce environments. While recent researchers have mainly concentrated on methods for generating high quality compound critiques, to date there has been a lack of comprehensive investigation on the interface design issues. Traditionally the interface is textual, which shows compound critiques in plain text and may not be easily understood. In this paper we propose a new visual interface which represents various critiques by a set of meaningful icons. Results from our real-user evaluation show that the visual interface can improve the performance of critique-based recommenders by attracting users to apply the compound critiques more frequently and reducing users' interaction effort substantially when the product domain is complex. Users' subjective feedback also shows that the visual interface is highly promising in enhancing users' shopping experience.