What is Your Current Mindset?

ABSTRACT Is recommendation the new search? Recommender systems have shortened the search for information in everyday activities such as following the news, media, and shopping. In this paper, we address the challenges of capturing the situational needs of the user and linking them to the available datasets with the concept of Mindsets. Mindsets are categories such as “I’m hungry” and “Surprise me” designed to lead the users to explicitly state their intent, control the recommended content, save time, get inspired, and gain shortcuts for a satisficing exploration of POI recommendations. In our methodology, we first compiled Mindsets with a card sorting workshop and a formative evaluation. Using the insights gathered from potential end users, we then quantified Mindsets by linking them to POI utility measures using approximated lexicographic multi-objective optimisation. Finally, we ran a summative evaluation of Mindsets and derived guidelines for designing novel categories for recommender systems.