See what you want to see

Research in recommender systems has traditionally focused on improving the predictive accuracy of recommendations by developing new algorithms or by incorporating new sources of data. However, several studies have shown that accuracy does not always correlate with a better user experience, leading to recent research that puts emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction in order to investigate aspects of the interface and user characteristics that influence the user experience on recommender systems. Following this new research this paper presents SetFusion, a visual user-controllable interface for hybrid recommender system. Our approach enables users to manually fuse and control the importance of recommender strategies and to inspect the fusion results using an interactive Venn diagram visualization. We analyze the results of two field studies in the context of a conference talk recommendation system, performed to investigate the effect of user controllability in a hybrid recommender. Behavioral analysis and subjective evaluation indicate that the proposed controllable interface had a positive effect on the user experience.