Enhancing recommendation diversity with organization interfaces

Research increasingly indicates that accuracy cannot be the sole criteria in creating a satisfying recommender from the users' point of view. Other criteria, such as diversity, are emerging as important characteristics for consideration as well. In this paper, we try to address the problem of augmenting users' perception of recommendation diversity by applying an organization interface design method to the commonly used list interface. An in-depth user study was conducted to compare an organization interface with a standard list interface. Our results show that the organization interface indeed effectively increased users' perceived diversity of recommendations, especially perceived categorical diversity. Furthermore, 65% of users preferred the organization interface, versus 20% for the list interface. 70% of users thought the organization interface is better at helping them perceive recommendation diversity versus only 15% for the list interface.