How Users Ride the Carousel: Exploring the Design of Multi-List Recommender Interfaces From a User Perspective
Loepp, B., & Ziegler, J. (2023). RecSys ’23: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems.
Abstract
Multi-list interfaces are widely used in recommender systems, especially in industry, showing collections of recommendations, one below the other, with items that have certain commonalities. The composition and order of these “carousels” are usually optimized by simulating user interaction based on probabilistic models learned from item click data. Research that actually involves users is rare, with only few studies investigating general user experience in comparison to conventional recommendation lists. Hence, it is largely unknown how specific design aspects such as carousel type and length influence the individual perception and usage of carousel-based interfaces. This paper seeks to fill this gap through an exploratory user study. The results confirm previous assumptions about user behavior and provide first insights into the differences in decision making in the presence of multiple recommendation carousels.
