Development of Website Design Personalization Service Using Design Recommender System

Personalized services in websites continue to increase with a distinct tendency toward the user-oriented paradigm; however, current personalized services related to website design are based on a very simple type of personalization, such as merely showing assembled webpages to a user according to his/her selections out of various design alternatives. Such a type of personalization has two problems; 1) the process of making selections imposes a heavy burden on users; 2) it is difficult to respond effectively to the user's preference, which is quite complicated and changed frequently. This study aims to improve the current personalized service in website design by making it more user-friendly and more user-adaptive. We began this task by first reviewing the present situation of personalization service in website and then attempting to apply a recommender system to the field of website design for more user-adaptive personalized service. Through literature review, major attributes of recommender systems from several points of view were identified such as recommender contents, user information, and recommender method. This literature review was followed by an analysis of how to apply these features of recommender system to website design efficiently. Based on these investigations, a design recommender system was proposed based on a collaborative filtering method that produces personal recommendations by computing the similarity between a user's preference and the one of other users. Our design recommender system consists of four major modules: User Entry Module, Design Attribute Entry Module, Design Customization Module, and Design Recommender Module. Finally, the detail procedure and methodology for the practical use of this system was developed.