Balancing adaptivity and customisation : in search of sustainable personalisation in cultural heritage

Personalisation for cultural heritage aims at delivering to visitors the right stories at the right time. Our endeavour to determine which features to use for adaptation starts from acknowledging what forms of personalisation curators value as most meaningful. Working in collaboration with curators we have explored the different features that must be taken into account: some are related to the content (multiple interpretation layers), others to the context of delivery (where and when), but some are idiosyncratic (“match my mood”, “something that is relevant to my life”). The findings reveal that a sustainable personalization needs to accurately balance: (i) support to curators in customising stories to different visitors; (ii) algorithms for the system to dynamically model aspects of the visit and instantiate the correct behaviour; and (iii) an active role for visitors to choose the type of experience they would like to have today

Evaluating the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems : Methodological issues and empirical studies on the impact of personalization

Peer reviewedPostprin

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time