A user study on groups interacting with tourist trip recommender systems in public spaces

Tourist groups exploring a city often face the problem of finding a sequence of points of interest that satisfies all group members. In this work, we present three different configurations of a group recommender system that suggests such trips even when tourists are already traveling: connecting multiple smartphones, sharing a public display, and combining both devices in a distributed user interface approach. We conducted a large user study with real groups to evaluate these configurations. Our results show that public displays are attractive for users who prefer an open discussion of their preferences. However, we have empirical evidence that decisions on group preferences often tend to be unfair for some group members, especially when they do not know each other very well. A distributed recommender system aggregating group members' individual preferences fairly with the option to display selected content on a public display was the most appreciated solution for overcoming this problem.