Users' needs, desires, and design preferences for recommendations in the living room

By using a combination of playful probing, creative cultural probing and technology probing, user needs and desires for recommendations in the living room were investigated. 40 households with a total of 126 participants took part in the ethnographic study. The participants used the probing material, received recommendations from an interactive TV (iTV) recommender system, and logged their TV watching behaviour. The findings show that recommendations should preferably be given within the same media (the iTV system), that users prefer to influence the proposal that they receive rather than getting automated recommendations and that the design should ideally support recommendations for the whole household and additionally for individuals. The study revealed that in order to understand which factors account for a successful recommendation system from the user's perspective, especially trust and security have to be further investigated.