Using a Painting Metaphor to Rate Large Numbers of Objects

When retrieving information from databases or search engines, or when configuring user profiles of information filtering systems, users have to describe what objects to retrieve. While some systems require users to describe their needs using textual input, other systems simplify the users’ task by proposing a set of items, so that the user’s task is reduced to picking or rating these items (e.g. relevance feedback (Haines 93)). This task is generally much simpler than writing queries from scratch. In interfaces of this type, users have to provide information of the type “does this item represent my information interest”, “do I like this item” or “how much do I like this item”. Similar problems are encountered in utility theory, when assessing the user’s value functions (Keeney and Raiffa 76). As an example, Figure 1 shows such a selection user interface. It allows users the selection of TV channels, e.g. to configure their user profile for a TV recommender system. The interface contains about sixty toggle switches.