A comparison of two compound critiquing systems

Compound critiques allow users to simultaneously express directional preferences over several product attributes. Presenting the user with compound critiques is not a new idea. The original Find-Me Systems (e.g., Car Navigator) showed static compound critiques; they didn't change irrespective of user preferences or the product availability. Recently, a number of techniques for dynamically generating compound critiques have been proposed. While these techniques have been evaluated in isolation, to date no direct comparison of these (in terms of their interfacing characteristics and recommendation performance) has been reported. Motivated by this, our research groups have come together to carry out this comparison for the approaches we each take. The user study platform that we have developed facilitates the comparison of various critiquing based recommenders. In this paper we report the first set of results from a comprehensive real-user evaluation of two dynamic compound critique systems using this evaluation platform.