Designing for the Better by Taking Users into Account: A Qualitative Evaluation of User Control Mechanisms in (News) Recommender Systems
Abstract
Recommender systems (RS) are on the rise in many domains. While they offer great promises, they also raise concerns: lack of transparency, reduction of diversity, little to no user control. In this paper, we align with the normative turn in computer science which scrutinizes the ethical and societal implications of RS. We focus and elaborate on the concept of user control because that mitigates multiple problems at once. Taking the news industry as our domain, we conducted four focus groups, or moderated think-aloud sessions, with Dutch news readers (N=21) to systematically study how people evaluate different control mechanisms (at the input, process, and output phase) in a News Recommender Prototype (NRP). While these mechanisms are sometimes met with distrust about the actual control they offer, we found that an intelligible user profile (including reading history and flexible preferences settings), coupled with possibilities to influence the recommendation algorithms is highly valued, especially when these control mechanisms can be operated in relation to achieving personal goals. By bringing (future) users' perspectives to the fore, this paper contributes to a richer understanding of why and how to design for user control in recommender systems.
diversity, filter bubble, frontpage, Mediarecht, recommender systems, Technologie en recht, Transparency
Bibtex
Article{Harambam2019b,
title = {Designing for the Better by Taking Users into Account: A Qualitative Evaluation of User Control Mechanisms in (News) Recommender Systems},
author = {Harambam, J. and Bountouridis, D. and Makhortykh, M. and van Hoboken, J.},
url = {https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/paper_recsys_19.pdf
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3347014},
year = {0919},
date = {2019-09-19},
journal = {RecSys'19: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems},
abstract = {Recommender systems (RS) are on the rise in many domains. While they offer great promises, they also raise concerns: lack of transparency, reduction of diversity, little to no user control. In this paper, we align with the normative turn in computer science which scrutinizes the ethical and societal implications of RS. We focus and elaborate on the concept of user control because that mitigates multiple problems at once. Taking the news industry as our domain, we conducted four focus groups, or moderated think-aloud sessions, with Dutch news readers (N=21) to systematically study how people evaluate different control mechanisms (at the input, process, and output phase) in a News Recommender Prototype (NRP). While these mechanisms are sometimes met with distrust about the actual control they offer, we found that an intelligible user profile (including reading history and flexible preferences settings), coupled with possibilities to influence the recommendation algorithms is highly valued, especially when these control mechanisms can be operated in relation to achieving personal goals. By bringing (future) users\' perspectives to the fore, this paper contributes to a richer understanding of why and how to design for user control in recommender systems.},
keywords = {diversity, filter bubble, frontpage, Mediarecht, recommender systems, Technologie en recht, Transparency},
}