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Last week I went over to Bentley college to talk about recommender systems for a class on user-centered design.  Not because I know anything about user-centered design - quite the opposite.  I'm hoping that some of the students in the class will apply their user-centered design skills to help us improve the user experience of our recommender.   It was fun talking to the class,  Managing a User-Centered Design Team.   The students  asked great questions, and  seemed  ready to  dive in.

I've promised to leave some pointers to some background reading for usability and recommender systems, so I'll be posting links in this blog post as I come across them.  

The first article is Interaction Design for Recommender Systems by Kirsten Swearingen, and Rashmi Sinha.  This article presents a study of user interaction with 11 online recommender systems.  Of particular interest is the observations about the role of transparency in  recommendations.  (Note also that author Rashmi Sinha has written some excellent articles about tagging as well: A cognitive analysis of tagging, and a Social Analysis of Tagging).

Update: Andre Vellino suggests Nava Tintarev's "A Survey of Explanations in Recommender Systems"