Paper Reading 23: Personalized User Interfaces for Product Configuration

Reference Information:

Title: Personalized User Interfaces for Product Configuration
Names of authors: Felfernig Alexander, Mandl Monika, Tiihonen Juha, Schubert Monika, Leitner Gerhard
Presentation venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:

Configuration technologies are well established as a foundation of mass customization which is a production paradigm that supports the manufacturing of highly-variant products under pricing conditions similar to mass production. A side-effect of the high diversity of products offered by a configurator is that the complexity of the alternatives may outstrip a user’s capability to explore them and make a buying decision. In order to improve the quality of configuration processes, the authors combine knowledge-based configuration with collaborative and content-based recommendation algorithms. In this paper the authors present configuration techniques that recommend personalized default values to users. Results of an empirical study show improvements in terms of, for example, user satisfaction or the quality of the configuration process.

Discussion:

I think the paper was pretty interesting, however, it was too technical and mathematical. There were no graphics or images in the paper. The paper had too many mathematical formulas and set notations and they weren't explained in the common man's language. Overall, the idea was very interesting, recommender systems are becoming more and more common on shopping websites and can be used as an excellent marketing tool.