User-Involved Preference Elicitation

When searching for configurable products, helping users to state their preferences is a crucial task. It involves helping users to understand the space of feasible configurations to decide on realistic preferences. However, many computer tools do not afford users to adequately focus on fundamental decision objectives, reveal hidden preferences, revise conflicting preferences, or explicitly reason about tradeoffs with competing decision goals. As a result, users often fail to find the best solution. From building decision support systems for various application domains, we have observed some common areas of design pitfalls, which could lead to undesirable user behaviors and ineffective use of decision systems. By incorporating findings from behavior decision theory, we have identified and accumulated a set of principles for avoiding these design pitfalls: 1) provide a flexible order and choice in preference elicitation so that users can focus on fundamental objectives, 2) include appropriate information in a decision context to guide users in revealing hidden preferences, and 3) make tradeoff attributes explicit to facilitate preference revision and flexible decision making. We describe these principles and the corresponding interface affordances, and discuss concrete scenarios where they have been applied and tested.