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Effective User Interface Designs to Increase Energy-efficient Behavior in a Rasch-based Energy Recommender System

Published: 27 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

People often struggle to find appropriate energy-saving measures to take in the household. Although recommender studies show that tailoring a system's interaction method to the domain knowledge of the user can increase energy savings, they did not actually tailor the conservation advice itself. We present two large user studies in which we support users to make an energy-efficient behavioral change by presenting tailored energy-saving advice. Both systems use a one-dimensional, ordinal Rasch scale, which orders 79 energy-saving measures on their behavioral difficulty and link this to a user's energy-saving ability for tailored advice. We established that recommending Rasch-based advice can reduce a user's effort, increase system support and, in turn, increase choice satisfaction and lead to the adoption of more energy-saving measures. Moreover, follow-up surveys administered four weeks later point out that tailoring advice on its feasibility can support behavioral change.

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cover image ACM Conferences
RecSys '17: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
August 2017
466 pages
ISBN:9781450346528
DOI:10.1145/3109859
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 27 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. behavioral change
  2. energy conservation
  3. rasch model
  4. recommender systems
  5. user experience

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RecSys '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 125 submissions, 21%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 254 of 1,295 submissions, 20%

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