Evaluating Design Alternatives for Feature Recommendations in Configuration Systems

Product configuration systems are an important instrument to implement mass customization, which is a production paradigm that supports the manufacturing of highly-variant products under pricing conditions similar to mass production. Previous research indicates that supporting users of product configuration systems with personalized feature recommendations (defaults) can lead to a higher satisfaction with the configuration process. Based on these findings, we investigate the influence of different representation styles of such defaults on users' perception of the configuration system. Additionally, we explore if different representation styles of defaults have an influence on users' selection behavior. For our user study we used RecoMobile, an environment which supports the configuration of mobile phones and corresponding subscription features. We found a strong relationship between the number of accepted default proposals and the perceived user interface quality. Our results further reveal that the different representation styles have a strong impact on users' perceived overall quality of the system.

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