Facilitating research through serendipity of recommendations

Recommender systems are used to suggest items that are useful to users. The recommendations can be surprising and may be categorized as serendipitous recommendations. One of the limitations with serendipitous recommendations is that the user interface of such a recommender system rarely supports the user to switch from accuracy orientation to serendipity facilitations. Using serendipitous recommendations can be challenging. This is because the user might not fully benefit from and understand the serendipitous recommendations. One main advantage of this type of system is that a serendipity-oriented recommender system can be used for the supervision of research students. It can help them to find a novel topic in the area of their research interests. This paper reports on a novel user interface design for facilitating serendipitous recommendations generation in educational environments. The user interface of this recommender system provides students with user controls and visualization in order to explore research articles. This research comprises user experience experiments conducted in an academic environment and evaluated by means of a user centered design evaluation. It involves research articles recommender system named JabRef. The recommender systems were used by students at the undergraduate level. Users reported an enhanced user experience while using the user controls and visualization and serendipitous resource discovery. It was found that user interface design can facilitate a serendipity recommender system in the learning environment. University professors supervising students during the research can also benefit from the recommender system.