A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Explanations for Product Reviews

Cosmetic products are inherently personal. Many people rely on product reviews when choosing to purchase cosmetics. However, reviewers can have tastes that vary based on personal, demographic or cultural background. Prior work has discussed methods for generating attribute-based explanations for item ratings on cosmetic products, based on associated text-based reviews. This paper focuses on evaluating explanation interfaces for product reviews and related attributes. We present the results of a cross-cultural user study that evaluates five associated explanation interfaces for cosmetic product reviews across groups of participants from three di↵erent cultural backgrounds. We applied a 3 by 2 within subjects experimental design in a user study (N=150) to evaluate e↵ects of UI design and personalization on a range of user experience metrics in a cosmetics shopping scenario. Results of the study show that 1) Korean and Japanese speakers chose the most complex UI more often than English speakers. 2) older participants also preferred more options in cosmetic product selection, regardless of cultural background. 3) personalization of product ratings did not show an e↵ect on user experience. 4) Attributebased explanations were preferred over star-ratings for all three cultures. 5) Rating propensity evaluation showed that Japanese provided significantly higher ratings than Korean or English participants, and that Females provided higher ratings than Males, regardless of background.