Near2Me: Design and Evaluation of a Personalized Recommender and Explorer for Off-the-beaten-track Travel Destinations
Luz Caballero · Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands · 2010
This project consists of the design and evaluation of Near2me, a personalized recommender and explorer for off-the-beatentrack travel destinations, developed within PetaMedia (a European Network of Excellence devoted to the study of the synergetic combination of social network structure, media content analysis, and user-generated annotations).This project was directed by two goals:1.The design and evaluation of a novel application that makes use of PetaMedia-developed technologies in a context meaningful to users.2. The exploration of a design methodology that puts the user at the center of the design process of technology-driven novel applications.We had to define the exact use case and functionality simultaneously while building the application, because our design was technology-driven and initially shaped by the capabilities offered by PetaMedia-developed technology.To make sure that the final product responding to our designed use case would still address a realistic, existing scenario, we guided and documented the design through a framework based on our design judgments and conducted a preliminary user study to identify the motivations of individuals that engage in Independent Travel that we used as guide for our design judgments: Near2Me: Design and Evaluation of a Personalized Recommender and Explorer for Off-the-beaten-track Travel Destinations