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Situational Recommender: Are You On the Spot, Refining Plans, or Just Bored?

When people engage in urban exploration, the tool they are most likely to use today is a mobile phone. In this paper, we present observations of users’ “home” and “away” conducted to refine our understanding of situational Point-of-Interest (POI) needs. Our findings suggest three distinct categories of situations in which users seek POI information: On-the-spot, Refining plans, and Moments of boredom. Based on the similarities and differences of these three situations in five observed underlying constraints – distance of interest, engagement threshold, ambiguity of the search, profile matching, and other imperative constraints, we derive implications for designing and ranking POIs for a Situational Recommender. To further access our concept, we designed and prototyped Situational Recommender by providing an interactional representation of the situation, and ran a Wizard-of-Oz concept validation study. Our results suggest that participants understood the concept without much effort and appreciated its usefulness.