What did the others do? Recommending by Visualising Fellow Travellers

Abstract

A problem when making recommendations based on the aggregated behavior of many users (collaborative recommendation) is to explain the rationale behind the recommendation. Our work investigates the alternative approach of visualizing the collaborative data, leaving it to the user to decide on a course of action, i.e. create the recommendation. A prototype system was built and evaluated in a joint project with the international transport and travel service company Stena Line. A user study showed that displaying statistics on other traveler’s ticket bookings indeed functioned as recommendations.