Service-Aware Interactive Presentation of Items for Decision-Making

Noemi Mauro,Rosario Galioto,Liliana Ardissono,Sara Capecchi

doi:10.3390/app10165599

Abstract

Current information exploration models present low-level features or technical aspects related to the paradigm used to generate results. While this may increase transparency, it does not help the user form a personal opinion about items because it does not describe the overall experience with them. In order to address this issue, we propose the INTERactivE viSualizaTion model (INTEREST) that supports the exploration and analysis of search results by means of a graphical representation of consumer feedback aimed at making the user aware of the service properties in all the stages of fruition, focusing on the data that is most relevant to her/him. INTEREST is based on the Service Journey Maps for the design and description of user experience with services. We applied it to the home booking domain by developing the Apartment Monitoring application that supports overviewing and analyzing online reviews about rented homes. In a user study, we compared the decision-making support provided by our application with that of a baseline model that enables a temporal filtering of consumer feedback. We found out that Apartment Monitoring outperforms the baseline in user experience, user awareness of item properties, and user control during the interaction with the system. In particular, according to the participants of the study, Apartment Monitoring describes the expectations about the homes and it supports their selection in a more effective way than the baseline. These findings encourage moving from a low-level description of item properties to a service-oriented one in order to improve users’ decision-making capabilities.

Highlights

The classical ranked list of results presented by search engines poorly supports content interpretation because it cannot explain why the returned items are relevant to the submitted query, or to some of its terms, and how results are related to each other; see in [1]
Service Journey Maps (SJM) are included as a visual model in the ServiceML language [24] that has been applied to industry case studies; they have been proposed to improve the design of online Reputation Management Systems
We propose the INTEractivE viSualizaTion model supporting decision-making to help the user in selecting the preferred items out of a list of options by exploiting a service design framework for the identification of evaluation dimensions

Summary

Introduction

The classical ranked list of results presented by search engines poorly supports content interpretation because it cannot explain why the returned items are relevant to the submitted query, or to some of its terms, and how results are related to each other; see in [1]. Starting from the intuition that service design and reputation system modeling share many demands (to represent a variety of entities involved in the related domains), aims (to improve services and businesses with the aim of meeting user needs), and problems (they all involve stakeholders having very different backgrounds and skills), Capecchi and Bettini et al [34,35] propose tools for service modeling that support designers in capturing high-level reputation management requirements and their implementation They show how consumer feedback can be directly matched to roles and partners involved in business/service creation to detect responsibilities and to plan appropriate actions

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion