Context-aware User Interaction for Mobile Recommender Systems

We are witnessing more and more mobile recommender systems applied in e-tourism, utilizing contextual information in order to boost productivity and user experience by generating more tailored suggestions to them. In the meantime, the design of these applications is getting more and more user-centered. Context of use is playing an important role in the appropriateness of a user interface (UI). This motivates our study to devise a novel approach for augmenting user interaction experience on smartphones by exploiting the current context of the end user. For this purpose, we have designed and implemented a context-aware UI based on an existing mobile application for recommending tourist places. We have conducted a user study and measured the effectiveness of our method in terms of three attributes: task completion time, the perceived user ease of use and the perceived user satisfaction. The within-subject evaluation conducted with 25 participants confirms that the proposed contextaware UI can enrich user interaction experiences.