Ricerc@Sapienza

The evaluation of an information visualization system is a complex activity, involving the understanding of both the visualization itself and the process that it is meant to support. Moreover, if the evaluation activity includes a task based user study, it requires a considerable effort, involving both conceptual (e.g., the definition of user tasks) and technical (e.g., logging of the relevant user actions while using the system) aspects.

In this paper, we present the outcomes of the first user study designed and evaluated in the context of the Smart City Robotics Challenge (SciRoc Challenge). The study presented in this paper has the main novelty of having been devised and implemented in a realistic environment: a robot competition where robot tasks were developed by participant teams, robots were fully autonomous, and user questionnaires were part of the competition score.

In this paper, we present the results of an extensive experimental study on users decisions inside an online setting. In the experiment, participants purchase songs using real money while having enough time to explore them at leisure before buying. In such a set up, surpisingly, common social influence signals such as star ratings, download counts and recommendations had no influence. However, as soon as the exploration was made slightly more cumbersome market inequality appeared.