User Attitudes Regarding a User-Adaptive eCommerce Web Site

Despite an abundance of recommendations by researchers and more recently by commercial enterprises for adaptive interaction techniques and technologies, there exists little experimental validation of the value of such approaches to users. We have conducted user studies focussed on the perceived value of a variety of personalization features for an eCommerce Web site for computing machinery sales and support. Our study results have implications for the design of user-adaptive applications. Interesting findings include unenthusiastic user attitudes toward system attempts to infer user needs, goals, or interests and to thereby provide user-specific adaptive content. Users also expressed equivocal opinions of collaborative filtering for the specific eCommerce scenarios we studied; thus personalization features popular in one eCommerce environment may not be effective or useful for other eCommerce domains. Users expressed their strong desire to have full and explicit control of data and interaction. Lastly, users want readily to be able to make sense of site behavior, that is, to understand a site’s rationale for displaying particular content.