What Is Serendipity? An Interview Study to Conceptualize Experienced Serendipity in Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This study conceptualizes experienced serendipity in recommender systems as a user experience involving unintentional encounters that are fortuitous, refreshing, and enriching, providing a unified framework for future research and system design.

Contribution

It offers a new, grounded theory-based conceptualization of serendipity, unifying previous definitions and identifying distinct flavors to improve system design and evaluation.

Findings

Serendipity involves fortuitous, refreshing, and enriching experiences.

All three components are necessary and sufficient for serendipity.

The framework highlights underexposed flavors of serendipity.

Abstract

Serendipity has been associated with numerous benefits in the context of recommender systems, e.g., increased user satisfaction and consumption of long-tail items. Despite this, serendipity in the context of recommender systems has thus far remained conceptually ambiguous. This conceptual ambiguity has led to inconsistent operationalizations between studies, making it difficult to compare and synthesize findings. In this paper, we conceptualize the user's experience of serendipity. To this effect, we interviewed 17 participants and analyzed the data following the grounded theory paradigm. Based on these interviews, we conceptualize experienced serendipity as "a user experience in which a user unintentionally encounters content that feels fortuitous, refreshing, and enriching". We find that all three components -- fortuitous, refreshing and enriching -- are necessary and together are sufficient to classify a user's experience as serendipitous. However, these components can be satisfied through a variety of conditions. Our conceptualization unifies previous definitions of serendipity within a single framework, resolving inconsistencies by identifying distinct flavors of serendipity. It highlights underexposed flavors, offering new insights into how users experience serendipity in the context of recommender systems. By clarifying the components and conditions of experienced serendipity in recommender systems, this work can guide the design of recommender systems that stimulate experienced serendipity in their users, and lays the groundwork for developing a standardized operationalization of experienced serendipity in its many flavors, enabling more consistent and comparable evaluations.