Designing and evaluating kalas: A social navigation system for food recipes

The idea of social navigation is to aid users to navigate information spaces through making the collective, aggregated, or individual actions of others visible and useful as a basis for making decisions on where to go next and what to choose. These social markers should also help in turning the navigation experience into a social and pleasurable one rather than the tedious, boring, frustrating, and sometimes even scary experience of a lonely traveler. To evaluate whether it is possible to design for social navigation, we built the food recipe system Kalas. It includes several different forms of aggregated trails of user actions and means of communication between users: recommender system functionality (recommendations computed from others' choices), real-time broadcasting of concurrent user activity in the interface, possibilities to comment and vote on recipes, the number of downloads per recipe, and chatting facilities. Recipe author was also included in the recipe description.Kalas was tried with 302 users during six months, and 73 of the users answered a final questionnaire. The overall impression was that users liked and acted on aggregated trails and navigated differently because of them. 18% of the selected recipes came from the list of recommended recipes. About half of the 73 users understood that recommendations were computed from their own and others actions, while the rest had not reflected upon it or had erroneous beliefs. Interestingly, both groups selected a large proportion of their recipes from the recommendations.Unfortunately, there were not enough users to populate the space at every occasion, and thus both chatting and following other users moving in the space was for the most part not possible, but when possible, users move to the space where most other users could be found. Of the other social textures, users themselves claimed to be most influenced by other users' comments attached to the recipes and less by recipe author or number of downloads. Users are more positive to the possibility of expressing themselves in terms of comments and voting than seeing the comments and votes of others.It was noted that users did not pick more recommended recipes towards the end of the study period when the accuracy of recommendations should have been higher. More or less from the start, they picked recommended recipes and went on doing so throughout the whole period.