TY - GEN
T1 - How serendipity improves user satisfaction with recommendations? A large-scale user evaluation
AU - Chen, Li
AU - Yang, Yonghua
AU - WANG, Ningxia
AU - Yang, Keping
AU - Yuan, Quan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) (project RGC/HKBU12200415).
PY - 2019/5/13
Y1 - 2019/5/13
N2 - Recommendation serendipity is being increasingly recognized as being equally important as the other beyond-accuracy objectives (such as novelty and diversity), in eliminating the “filter bubble” phenomenon of the traditional recommender systems. However, little work has empirically verified the effects of serendipity on increasing user satisfaction and behavioral intention. In this paper, we report the results of a large-scale user survey (involving over 3,000 users) conducted in an industrial mobile e-commerce setting. The study has identified the significant causal relationships from novelty, unexpectedness, relevance, and timeliness to serendipity, and from serendipity to user satisfaction and purchase intention. Moreover, our findings reveal that user curiosity plays a moderating role in strengthening the relationships from novelty to serendipity and from serendipity to satisfaction. Our third contribution lies in the comparison of several recommender algorithms, which demonstrates the significant improvements of the serendipity-oriented algorithm over the relevance- and novelty-oriented approaches in terms of user perceptions. We finally discuss the implications of this experiment, which include the feasibility of developing a more precise metric for measuring recommendation serendipity, and the potential benefit of a curiosity-based personalized serendipity strategy for recommender systems.
AB - Recommendation serendipity is being increasingly recognized as being equally important as the other beyond-accuracy objectives (such as novelty and diversity), in eliminating the “filter bubble” phenomenon of the traditional recommender systems. However, little work has empirically verified the effects of serendipity on increasing user satisfaction and behavioral intention. In this paper, we report the results of a large-scale user survey (involving over 3,000 users) conducted in an industrial mobile e-commerce setting. The study has identified the significant causal relationships from novelty, unexpectedness, relevance, and timeliness to serendipity, and from serendipity to user satisfaction and purchase intention. Moreover, our findings reveal that user curiosity plays a moderating role in strengthening the relationships from novelty to serendipity and from serendipity to satisfaction. Our third contribution lies in the comparison of several recommender algorithms, which demonstrates the significant improvements of the serendipity-oriented algorithm over the relevance- and novelty-oriented approaches in terms of user perceptions. We finally discuss the implications of this experiment, which include the feasibility of developing a more precise metric for measuring recommendation serendipity, and the potential benefit of a curiosity-based personalized serendipity strategy for recommender systems.
KW - Curiosity
KW - Large-scale user evaluation
KW - Recommender systems
KW - Serendipity
KW - User satisfaction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066890555&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3308558.3313469
DO - 10.1145/3308558.3313469
M3 - Conference proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85066890555
SN - 9781450366748
T3 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference
SP - 240
EP - 250
BT - WWW '19: The World Wide Web Conference
A2 - Liu, Ling
A2 - White, Ryen
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
Y2 - 13 May 2019 through 17 May 2019
ER -