Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/1298023.1298034acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesihcConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Evaluating the impact of different virtual characters in product recommendations

Published: 19 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of the effect that distinct interface characters could have on the users' perception of their interaction with an ecommerce website. A recommender system has been integrated to the characters' architecture, with the goal of assessing their impact in making personalized recommendations. The characters used to interact with the users had different features such as being a known or an unknown person; being represented by an anthropomorphic figure or not. In spite of these differences, the characters also had a lot of similarities: they used the same language and had the same strategy for recommending products. They also had the same type of graphical representation. An experiment involving 180 students was set up, in which students had to complete a few purchases in an ecommerce website where the virtual characters gave tips and suggested products related to the users' perceived interests. The results of the experiment are presented here, as well as conclusions and direction for future work.

References

[1]
Andre, E., Rist, T., and Muller, J. Employing AI methods to control the behavior of animated interface agents. Applied Artificial Intelligence, Volume 13, Numbers 4--5, May 1999, pp. 415--448.
[2]
Blake, C. L., and Merz, C. J. UCI Repository of machine learning databases {http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLRepository.html}. Irvine, CA: University of California, Department of Information and Computer Science. 1998.
[3]
Blom, J. and Monk, A. One-to-one e-commerce. who's the one? In Proceedings CHI 2003 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press. Seattle, Washington, 31 March - 5 April 2001.
[4]
Blom, J. Designing Personalized User Experiences for eCommerce: Theory, Methods, and Research. In Proceedings CHI 2003 -- Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press. Fort Lauderdale, Florida, April 5--10, 2003.
[5]
Breese, J., Heckerman, D. and Kadie, C. Empirical Analysis of Predictive Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Madison, WI, July, Morgan Kaufmann Publisher. 1998.
[6]
Chorianopoulos, K. and Spinellis, D. Affective usability evaluation for an interactive music television channel. Computers in Entertainment, 2(3):14, July 2004.
[7]
Claypool, M., Brown, D., Le, P. and Waseda, M. Inferring User Interest. IEEE Internet Computing, 5(6), 2001, pp. 32--39.H.
[8]
Craig, S. D., Gholson, B. and Driscoll, D. M. Animated Pedagogical Agents in Multimedia Educational Environments. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2002, Vol. 94, No. 2, pp. 428--434.
[9]
De Angeli, A., Lynch, P. and Johnson, G. Personifying the e-market: A framework for social agents. In Proceedings of Interact 2001 - Eighth IFIP TC.13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Tokyo, Japan, July 9--13, 2001.
[10]
Eirinaki, M. and Vazirgiannis, M. Web Mining for Web Personalization. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1--27, February 2003.
[11]
Hayes-Roth, B., Maldonado, H. and Moraes, M. Designing for Diversity: Multi-Cultural Characters for a Multi-Cultural World. In Proceedings of IMAGINA 2002, pp. 207--225. Monte Carlo, Monaco, 2002.
[12]
Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., and Riedl, J. Explaining Collaborative Filtering Recommendations. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. 2000.
[13]
Isbister, K., HöökSpecial, K. (Guest editors). IJHCS: Evaluating Affective Interactions. Special Issue of IJHCS (International Journal of Human Computer Studies). Autumn 2006.
[14]
Lester, J., Converse, S., Stone, B. A., Kahler, S. E., & Barlow, S. T. Animated pedagogical agents and problem-solving effectiveness: A large-scale empirical evaluation. In Proceedings of the Eighth World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Kobe, Japan, 1997.
[15]
McBreen, P. Shade, M. Jack, and P. Wyard. Experimental assessment of the effectiveness of synthetic personae for multi-modal e-retail applications. In Proceedings 4th Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'2000), pp. 39--45, New York, 2000. ACM Press.
[16]
Moreno, R., and Mayer, R. E. Cognitive principles of multimedia learning: The role of modality and contiguity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(2), 1999, pp. 358--368.
[17]
Naas, C. and Lee, K. M. Does computer-generated manifest personality? An experimental test of similarityattraction. In Proceedings CHI 2000 -- Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, pp. 49--57, 2001.
[18]
Pandzic, I. S., Ostermann, J. and Millen, D. User Evaluation: Synthetic Talking Faces for Interactive Services. The Visual Computer, Springer Verlag, vol. 15. pp. 330--340. 1999.
[19]
Picard, R. Towards Agents that Recognize Emotion. In Proceedings of IMAGINA, 1998.
[20]
Prendinger, H.; Ma, C. and Yingzi, J. Understanding the Effect of LifeLike Interface Agents Through Users' Eye Movements. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces ICMI'05, Trento, Italy, October 4--6, 2005.
[21]
Reategui, E., Campbell, J. A. & Torres, R. Using Item Descriptors in Recommender Systems. The Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2004) - Workshop on Semantic Web Personalization, July 27, 2004, San Jose, USA.
[22]
Rafter, R., and Smyth, B. Conversational Collaborative Recommendation -- An Experimental Analysis. Artificial Intelligence Review, vol 24. pp. 301--318, 2005.
[23]
Rickenberg, R. and Reeves, B. The Effects of Animated Characters on Anxiety, Task Performance, and Evaluations of User Interfaces, In Proceedings CHI 2000 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, The Hague, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2000.
[24]
Rist, T., André, E., Müller. J. 1997. Adding Animated. Presentation Agents to the Interface. In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 97), pp. 79--86, N.Y.: ACM Press, 1997.
[25]
Schafer, J. B., Konstan, J., and Reidl, J. Recommender Systems in E-Commerce. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Denver, Colorado, USA. 1999.
[26]
Shapiro, S. C., Kwasny, S. C. Interactive consultina via natural language. Communications of the ACM, vol 18, num 18, August 1975.
[27]
Shaw, E. and Johnson, W. L. Pedagogical agents on the Web. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, NY, 1999, pp. 283--290.
[28]
Walker, J. H., Sproull, L., Subramani, R. Using a Human Face in an Interface. In Proceedings CHI 1994 -- Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, pp. 85--91, 1994.
[29]
Wallace, David J. She's Only Code and Pixels, but She Can Help You Shop. The New York Times, September 20, 2000. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/technology/20wallace.html
[30]
Weizenbaum, J. Contextual understanding by computers. Communications of the ACM, vol 10, num. 8, August 1967.

Index Terms

  1. Evaluating the impact of different virtual characters in product recommendations

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    IHC '06: Proceedings of VII Brazilian symposium on Human factors in computing systems
    November 2006
    251 pages
    ISBN:1595934324
    DOI:10.1145/1298023
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    • SBC: Brazilian Computer Society
    • CEIHC - SBC Special Interest Group in Human-Computer Interaction

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 19 November 2006

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. recommender systems
    2. virtual characters

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    IHC'06
    Sponsor:
    • SBC
    IHC'06: VII Symposium on Human Factors in Computer Systems
    November 19 - 22, 2006
    Natal, RN, Brazil

    Acceptance Rates

    IHC '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 68 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 331 of 973 submissions, 34%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • 0
      Total Citations
    • 281
      Total Downloads
    • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media