Interactive mobile news recommender system: A preliminary study of usability factors

Interactive news recommender systems allow the user to steer the received recommendations in the desired directions through explicit interaction with the system. It provides a user experience in between a “lean back and let the news wash over me” experience and an “active search and hunt for specific pieces” experience. On the other hand, this added level of interaction might also be perceived as extra burden from the user side and therefore experience a decreased level of user experience. This paper describes a user study which uncovers factors that influence the usability of interactive news recommender system. The user study is carried out by contrasting an experimental system where interaction is granted with a baseline system where interaction is absent. The study demonstrated that test participants find the ability to actively shape its news recommendation strategy a useful and desirable feature. In addition, time, location and user interest as dimensions for interaction seems reasonable. Lastly, it identifies three factors that are of particular importance when designing interactive news recommender systems.