Personalized user interfaces for product configuration

Abstract

Configuration technologies are well established as a foundation of mass customization which is a production paradigm that supports the manufacturing of highly-variant products under pricing conditions similar to mass production. A side-effect of the high diversity of products offered by a configurator is that the complexity of the alternatives may outstrip a user's capability to explore them and make a buying decision. In order to improve the quality of configuration processes, we combine knowledge-based configuration with collaborative and content-based recommendation algorithms. In this paper we present configuration techniques that recommend personalized default values to users. Results of an empirical study show improvements in terms of, for example, user satisfaction or the quality of the configuration process.