Evaluating Design Alternatives for Feature Recommendations in Configuration Systems

Product configuration systems are an important instrument to implement mass customization, which is a production paradigm that supports the manufacturing of highly-variant products under pricing conditions similar to mass production. Previous research indicates that supporting users of product configuration systems with personalized feature recommendations (defaults) can lead to a higher satisfaction with the configuration process. Based on these findings, we investigate the influence of different representation styles of such defaults on users´ perception of the configuration system. Additionally, we explore if different representation styles of defaults have an influence on users´ selection behavior. For our user study we used RecoMobile, an environment which supports the configuration of mobile phones and corresponding subscription features. We found a strong relationship between the number of accepted default proposals and the perceived user interface quality. Our results further reveal that the different representation styles have a strong impact on users´ perceived overall quality of the system.