Users’ Decision Behavior in Recommender Interfaces: Impact of Layout Design

Recommender systems have been increasingly adopted in the current Web environment, to facilitate users in efficiently locating items in which they are interested. However, most studies so far have emphasized the algorithm’s performance, rather than from the user’s perspective to investigate her/his decision-making behavior in the recommender interfaces. In this paper, we have performed a user study, with the aim to evaluate the role of layout designs in influencing users’ decision process. The compared layouts include three typical ones: list, grid and pie. The experiment revealed significant differences among them, with regard to users’ clicking behavior and subjective perceptions. In particular, pie has been demonstrated to significantly increase users’ decision confidence, enjoyability, perceived recommender competence, and usage intention.