Interactive Content Diversity and User Exploration in Online Movie Recommenders: A Field Experiment

TL;DR

This study investigates how different levels of recommendation diversity and user interface designs affect user satisfaction and exploration in online movie recommender systems through surveys and a field experiment.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates new interface designs that enhance content diversity and user exploration in movie recommender systems, based on real-world user data.

Findings

User satisfaction is influenced by exploration control levels.

Preferences for recommendation breadth vary among users.

Interface design impacts user engagement and perceived usefulness.

Abstract

Recommender systems often struggle to strike a balance between matching users' tastes and providing unexpected recommendations. When recommendations are too narrow and fail to cover the full range of users' preferences, the system is perceived as useless. Conversely, when the system suggests too many items that users don't like, it is considered impersonal or ineffective. To better understand user sentiment about the breadth of recommendations given by a movie recommender, we conducted interviews and surveys and found out that many users considered narrow recommendations to be useful, while a smaller number explicitly wanted greater breadth. Additionally, we designed and ran an online field experiment with a larger user group, evaluating two new interfaces designed to provide users with greater access to broader recommendations. We looked at user preferences and behavior for two groups of users: those with higher initial movie diversity and those with lower diversity. Among our findings, we discovered that different level of exploration control and users' subjective preferences on interfaces are more predictive of their satisfaction with the recommender.