Frappe: Understanding the Usage and Perception of Mobile App Recommendations In-The-Wild
This work addresses the practical challenges of deploying context-aware recommender systems for mobile apps in real-world settings, though it is incremental in nature.
The authors deployed a context-aware mobile app recommender system called Frappe with 1000 Android users and conducted a small study with 33 users to analyze usage patterns and user perceptions. The system performed well on usage metrics, but the study revealed negative user experiences, leading to actionable lessons for designing such systems.
This paper describes a real world deployment of a context-aware mobile app recommender system (RS) called Frappe. Utilizing a hybrid-approach, we conducted a large-scale app market deployment with 1000 Android users combined with a small-scale local user study involving 33 users. The resulting usage logs and subjective feedback enabled us to gather key insights into (1) context-dependent app usage and (2) the perceptions and experiences of end-users while interacting with context-aware mobile app recommendations. While Frappe performs very well based on usage-centric evaluation metrics insights from the small-scale study reveal some negative user experiences. Our results point to a number of actionable lessons learned specifically related to designing, deploying and evaluating mobile context-aware RS in-the-wild with real users.