The effects of recommendations' presentation on persuasion and satisfaction in a movie recommender system

The explosive growth of Internet applications and content, during the last decade, has revealed an increasing need for information filtering and recommendation. Most research in the area of recommendation systems has focused on designing and implementing efficient algorithms that provide accurate recommendations. However, the selection of appropriate recommendation content and the presentation of information are equally important in creating successful recommender applications. This paper addresses issues related to the presentation of recommendations in the movies domain. The current work reviews previous research approaches and popular recommender systems, and focuses on user persuasion and satisfaction. In our experiments, we compare different presentation methods in terms of recommendations' organization in a list (i.e. top N-items list and structured overview) and recommendation modality (i.e. simple text, combination of text and image, and combination of text and video). The most efficient presentation methods, regarding user persuasion and satisfaction, proved to be the "structured overview" and the "text and video" interfaces, while a strong positive correlation was also found between user satisfaction and persuasion in all experimental conditions.