Frappe: Understanding the Usage and Perception of Mobile App Recommendations In-The-Wild

TL;DR

This study deploys a context-aware mobile app recommender system called Frappe to analyze user behavior and perceptions in real-world settings, providing insights into design and evaluation challenges.

Contribution

It presents a large-scale deployment and user study of Frappe, revealing practical insights into user interactions and perceptions of context-aware recommendations in-the-wild.

Findings

Frappe performs well on usage metrics

Users report some negative experiences

Key lessons for deploying context-aware RS in real-world environments

Abstract

This paper describes a real world deployment of a context-aware mobile app recommender system (RS) called Frappe. Utilizing a hybrid-approach, we conducted a large-scale app market deployment with 1000 Android users combined with a small-scale local user study involving 33 users. The resulting usage logs and subjective feedback enabled us to gather key insights into (1) context-dependent app usage and (2) the perceptions and experiences of end-users while interacting with context-aware mobile app recommendations. While Frappe performs very well based on usage-centric evaluation metrics insights from the small-scale study reveal some negative user experiences. Our results point to a number of actionable lessons learned specifically related to designing, deploying and evaluating mobile context-aware RS in-the-wild with real users.