Abstract

ALEJANDRES-SANCHEZ, Hugo Omar; GONZALEZ-SERNA, Juan Gabriel  and  GONZALEZ-FRANCO, Nimrod. Effect of Explanations on Users’ Trust in Context-Aware Recommender Systems. Ing. invest. y tecnol. [online]. 2016, vol.17, n.4, pp.419-428. ISSN 2594-0732.

Explanations on recommender systems have been used to improve components of user experience. It has been proven that explanations are useful to enhance users’ perception on satisfaction and persuade users to adopt the recommender system. This paper focuses on evaluating user trust and the trade-offs with understandability and cognitive effort by using explanations in a specific type of recommender system: context-aware. We performed an user experiment with an organizational recommender system that gives recommendations of people, places, events, knowledge objects and infrastructure, using three different types of explanations: conceptual maps, mind maps and textual explanation. The results show that although mind and conceptual maps increases users’ understanding of recommendations and decreases cognitive effort, textual explanations improves the users’ trust on the system even when they require much cognitive effort to be understood.

Keywords : user experience; system evaluation; Findit!; structural equation modeling; explanations; user studies; context-awareness; user trust.

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