Paper reading #30: 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 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

This paper was interesting to read, however, it was too technical and mathematical. I got confused pretty fast.  There were no graphics or images in the paper. Overall, the idea was still very interesting though. Recommender systems are becoming more and more common on shopping websites like Amazon, or Google checkout and can be used as an excellent marketing tool.