Recommender-based User Guidance Framework

User guidance is crucial for a seamless user experience in a software system. This paper explores the need for effective user guidance mechanisms to enhance user experience and reduce human errors and frustration. In order to do that, we formalise and symbolically represent user guidance for versatile applications across diverse contexts by considering the knowledge base on users and software systems. We comprehensively analyse four distinct categories of user guidance mechanisms, namely, familiarisation, continuation, navigation, and customisation, with examples and expected data needed for each category. In addition, we investigate whether a recommender system (RS) can function as an appropriate tool to intelligently guide a user through a virtual reality (VR) authoring platform and describe the implementation of the corresponding RS-based guidance mechanism that aligns with the proposed formalisation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the present state of affairs and prospects for future research.