Usability assessment of a context-aware and personality-based mobile recommender system

Abstract. In this paper we present STS (South Tyrol Suggests), a context-aware mobile recommender system for places of interest (POIs) that integrates some innovative components, including: a personality questionnaire, i.e., a brief and entertaining questionnaire used by the system to learn users ’ personality; an active learning module that ac-quires ratings-in-context for POIs that users are likely to have experi-enced; and a matrix factorization based recommendation module that leverages the personality information and several contextual factors in order to generate more relevant recommendations. Adopting a system oriented perspective, we describe the assessment of the combination of the implemented components. We focus on usability aspects and report the end-user assessment of STS. It was obtained from a controlled live user study as well as from the log data produced by a larger sample of users that have freely downloaded and tried STS through Google Play Store. The result of the assessment showed that the overall usability of the system falls between “good ” and “excellent”, it helped us to identify potential problems and it provided valuable indications for future system improvement