Music-based reminiscence has the potential to positively impact the psychological well-being of older adults. However, the aging process and physiological changes, such as memory decline and limited verbal communication, may impede the ability of older adults to recall their memories and life experiences. Given the advanced capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as generated conversations and images, and their potential to facilitate the reminiscing process, this study aims to explore the design of generative AI to support music-based reminiscence in older adults. This study follows a user-centered design approach incorporating various stages, including detailed interviews with two social workers and two design workshops (involving ten older adults). Our work contributes to an in-depth understanding of older adults’ attitudes toward utilizing generative AI for supporting music-based reminiscence and identifies concrete design considerations for the future design of generative AI to enhance the reminiscence experience of older adults.

The rapid development of musical AI technologies has expanded the creative potential of various musical activities, ranging from music style transformation to music generation. However, little research has investigated how musical AIs can support music therapists, who urgently need new technology support. This study used a mixed method, including semi-structured interviews and a participatory design approach. By collaborating with music therapists, we explored design opportunities for musical AIs in music therapy. We presented the co-design outcomes involving the integration of musical AIs into a music therapy process, which was developed from a theoretical framework rooted in emotion-focused therapy. After that, we concluded the benefits and concerns surrounding music AIs from the perspective of music therapists. Based on our findings, we discussed the opportunities and design implications for applying musical AIs to music therapy. Our work offers valuable insights for developing human-AI collaborative music systems in therapy involving complex procedures and specific requirements.

An increasing number of recommendation systems try to enhance the overall user experience by incorporating conversational interaction. However, evaluating conversational recommender systems (CRSs) from the user’s perspective remains elusive. The GUI-based system evaluation criteria may be inadequate for their conversational counterparts. This article presents our proposed unifying framework, CRS-Que , to evaluate the user experience of CRSs. This new evaluation framework is developed based on ResQue , a popular user-centric evaluation framework for recommender systems. Additionally, it includes user experience metrics of conversation (e.g., understanding, response quality, humanness) under two dimensions of ResQue (i.e., Perceived Qualities and User Beliefs). Following the psychometric modeling method, we validate our framework by evaluating two conversational recommender systems in different scenarios: music exploration and mobile phone purchase . The results of the two studies support the validity and reliability of the constructs in our framework and reveal how conversation constructs and recommendation constructs interact and influence the overall user experience of the CRS. We believe this framework could help researchers conduct standardized user-centric research for conversational recommender systems and provide practitioners with insights into designing and evaluating a CRS from users’ perspectives.

Music can affect the human brain and cognition. Melodies and lyrics that resonate with us can awaken our inner feelings and thoughts; being in touch with these feelings and expressing them allow us to understand ourselves better and increase our self-awareness. To support self-awareness elicited by music, we designed a novel conversational agent (CA) that guides users to become self-aware and express their thoughts when they listen to music. Moreover, we investigated two prominent design factors in the CA, proactive guidance and social information. We then conducted a 2x2 between-subjects experiment (N = 90) to investigate how the two design factors affect self-awareness, user acceptance, and mental well-being. The results of a five-day user study reveal that high proactive guidance and social information increased self-awareness, but high proactive guidance tended to influence perceived autonomy and usefulness negatively. Further, users’ subjective feedback revealed the CA’s potential to support mental well-being.

Online music platforms that include social networking features sometimes become supportive social communities where young people can disclose their emotional distress and receive support. However, few studies have examined young people's disclosure in social music communities or the support they provide or receive. In this study, which focuses on a large online music platform as a research site, we used mixed methods to analyze young users' comments (N = 163) and the associated replies (N = 2,732) related to their psychological distress (e.g., depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness). We found that the main types of comments involved experience sharing, and these comments often invoked peer support in the form of encouragement, caring, or self-disclosure. We also conducted an interview study with 13 young users of our research site to understand their perceptions of and motives for engaging in disclosure and support. The interviewees stated that music-induced and comment-induced emotional resonance was the main reason for their disclosure and support. Finally, we discussed the implications of our findings for designing a supportive social music community to benefit youth mental health.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) imitate human advisors to assist users in finding items through conversations and have recently gained increasing attention in domains such as media and e-commerce. Like in human communication, building trust in human-agent communication is essential given its significant influence on user behavior. However, inspiring user trust in CRSs with a “one-size-fits-all” design is difficult, as individual users may have their own expectations for conversational interactions (e.g., who, user or system, takes the initiative), which are potentially related to their personal characteristics. In this study, we investigated the impacts of three personal characteristics, namely personality traits, trust propensity, and domain knowledge, on user trust in two types of text-based CRSs, i.e., user-initiative and mixed-initiative. Our between-subjects user study (N=148) revealed that users’ trust propensity and domain knowledge positively influenced their trust in CRSs, and that users with high conscientiousness tended to trust the mixed-initiative system.

Systems involving artificial intelligence (AI) are protagonists in many everyday activities. Moreover, designers are increasingly implementing these systems for groups of users in various social and cooperative domains. Unfortunately, research on personalized recommendation systems often reports negative experiences due to a lack of diversity, control, or transparency. Providing a meta-analysis of the interaction design strategies for group recommendation systems (GRS) offers designers and practitioners a departure to address these issues and imagine new interaction possibilities for this context. Therefore, we systematically reviewed the ACM, IEEE, and Scopus digital libraries to identify GRS interface designs, resulting in a final corpus of 142 academic papers. After a systematic coding process, we used descriptive statistics and thematic analysis to uncover the current state of the art regarding interaction design strategies for GRS in six areas: (1) application domains; (2) devices chosen to implement the systems; (3) prototype fidelity; (4) strategies for profile transparency, justification, control, and diversity; (5) strategies for group formation and final group consensus; and, (6) evaluation methods applied in user studies during the design process. Based on our findings, we present an exhaustive typology of interaction design strategies for GRS and a set of research opportunities to foster human-centered interfaces for personalized recommendations in cooperative and social computing contexts.

Dialogue-based conversational recommender systems (DCRSs) have become a new trend in recommender systems (RSs), allowing users to communicate with the system in natural language to facilitate feedback provision and product exploration. However, little work has been done to empirically study user perception of and interaction with such systems and, more importantly, how to best support users in providing feedback on the recommendation they receive. In this article, we aim to develop effectivecritiquingmechanisms for DCRS to improve its feedback elicitation process (i.e., allowing users tocritiquethe current recommendation during the dialogue). Specifically, we have implemented three prototype systems featuring three different critiquing techniques, respectively, i.e.,user-initiated critiquing, progressive system-suggested critiquing, andcascading system-suggested critiquing. We have then conducted two task-oriented user studies involving 292 subjects to evaluate the three prototypes. In particular, we consider two typical types of user tasks in RSs: basic recommendation task (BRT, i.e., looking for items according to the user’s preferences), and exploration-oriented task (EOT, i.e., exploring different types of items). Results show that EOT stimulates more user interaction, while BRT results in higher user satisfaction. Moreover, when users perform EOT, the type of critiquing techniques is more likely to influence user perception and moderate the relationships between certain interaction metrics and users’ perceived serendipity. The findings suggest effective critiquing techniques to enhance the interaction between users and the recommendation chatbot when the system makes recommendations for different purposes.

An increasing number of recommender systems enable conversational interaction to enhance the system’s overall user experience (UX). However, it is unclear what qualities of a conversational recommender system (CRS) are essential to determine the success of a CRS. This paper presents a model to capture the key qualities of conversational recommender systems and their related user experience aspects. Our model incorporates the characteristics of conversations (such as adaptability, understanding, response quality, rapport, humanness, etc.) in four major user experience dimensions of the recommender system: User Perceived Qualities, User Belief, User Attitudes, and Behavioral Intentions. Following the psychometric modeling method, we validate the combined metrics using the data collected from an online user study of a conversational music recommender system. The user study results 1) support the consistency, validity, and reliability of the model that identifies seven key qualities of a CRS; and 2) reveal how conversation constructs interact with recommendation constructs to influence the overall user experience of a CRS. We believe that the key qualities identified in the model help practitioners design and evaluate conversational recommender systems.

Dialogue-based conversational recommender systems allow users to give language-based feedback on the recommended item, which has great potential for supporting users to explore the space of recommendations through conversation. In this work, we consider incorporating critiquing techniques into conversational systems to facilitate users’ exploration of music recommendations. Thus, we have developed a music chatbot with three system variants, which are respectively featured with three different critiquing techniques, i.e., user-initiated critiquing (UC), progressive system-suggested critiquing (Progressive SC), and cascading system-suggested critiquing (Cascading SC). We conducted a between-subject study (N=107) to compare these three types of systems with regards to music exploration in terms of user perception and user interaction. Results show that both UC and SC are useful for music exploration, while users perceive higher diversity of recommendations with the system that offers Cascading SC and perceive more serendipitous with the system that offers Progressive SC. In addition, we find that the critiquing techniques significantly moderate the relationships between some interaction metrics (e.g., number of listened songs, number of dialogue turns) and users’ perceived helpfulness and serendipity during music exploration.

Critiquing-based recommender systems aim to elicit more accurate user preferences from users' feedback toward recommendations. However, systems using a graphical user interface (GUI) limit the way that users can critique the recommendation. With the rise of chatbots in many application domains, they have been regarded as an ideal platform to build critiquing-based recommender systems. Therefore, we present MusicBot, a chatbot for music recommendations, featured with two typical critiquing techniques, user-initiated critiquing (UC) and system-suggested critiquing (SC). By conducting a within-subjects (N=45) study with two typical scenarios of music listening, we compared a system of only having UC with a hybrid critiquing system that combines SC with UC. Furthermore, we analyzed the effects of four personal characteristics,musical sophistication (MS), desire for control (DFC), chatbot experience (CE), and tech savviness (TS), on the user's perception and interaction of the recommendation in MusicBot. In general, compared with UC, SC yields higher perceived diversity and efficiency in looking for songs; combining UC and SC tends to increase user engagement. Both MS and DFC positively influence several key user experience (UX) metrics of MusicBot such as interest matching, perceived controllability, and intent to provide feedback.

Music preferences are likely to depend on contextual characteristics such as location and activity. However, most recommender systems do not allow users to adapt recommendations to their current context. We therefore built ContextPlay, a context-aware music recommender that enables user control for both contextual characteristics and music preferences. By conducting a mixed-design study (N=114) with four typical scenarios of music listening, we investigate the effect of controlling contextual characteristics in a music recommender system on four aspects: perceived quality, diversity, effectiveness, and cognitive load. Compared to our baseline which only allows to specify music preferences, having additional control for context leads to higher perceived quality and does not increase cognitive load. We also find that the contexts of mood, weather, and location tend to influence user perception of the system. Moreover, we found that users are more likely to modify contexts and their profile during relaxing activities.

Previous research has found that enabling users to control the recommendation process increases user satisfaction. However, providing additional controls also increases cognitive load, and different users have different needs for control. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the effect of two personal characteristics: musical sophistication and visual memory capacity. We designed a visual user interface, on top of a commercial music recommender, with different controls: interactions with recommendations (i.e., the output of a recommender system), the user profile (i.e., the top listened songs), and algorithm parameters (i.e., weights in an algorithm). We created eight experimental settings with combinations of these three user controls and conducted a between-subjects study (N=240), to explore the effect on cognitive load and recommendation acceptance for different personal characteristics. We found that controlling recommendations is the most favorable single control element. In addition, controlling user profile and algorithm parameters was the most beneficial setting with multiple controls. Moreover, the participants with high musical sophistication perceived recommendations to be of higher quality, which in turn lead to higher recommendation acceptance. However, we found no effect of visual working memory on either cognitive load or recommendation acceptance. This work contributes an understanding of how to design control that hits the sweet spot between the perceived quality of recommendations and acceptable cognitive load.

When recommendations become increasingly personalized, users are often presented with a narrower range of content. To mitigate this issue, diversity-enhanced user interfaces for recommender systems have in the past found to be effective in increasing overall user satisfaction with recommendations. However, users may have different requirements for diversity, and consequently different visualization requirements. In this paper, we evaluate two visual user interfaces, SimBub and ComBub, to present the diversity of a music recommender system from different perspectives. SimBub is a baseline bubble chart that shows music genres and popularity by color and size, respectively. In addition, ComBub visualizes selected audio features along the X and Y axis in a more advanced and complex visualization. Our goal is to investigate how individual traits such as musical sophistication (MS) and visual memory (VM) influence the satisfaction of the visualization for perceived music diversity, overall usability, and support to identify blind-spots. We hypothesize that music experts, or people with better visual memory, will perceive higher diversity in ComBub than SimBub. A within-subjects user study (N=83) is conducted to compare these two visualizations. Results of our study show that participants with high MS and VM tend to perceive significantly higher diversity from ComBub compared to SimBub. In contrast, participants with low MS perceived significantly higher diversity from SimBub than ComBub; however, no significant result is found for the participants with low VM. Our research findings show the necessity of considering individual traits while designing diversity-aware interfaces.

The "black box'' nature of today's recommender systems raises a number of challenges for users, including a lack of trust and limited user control. Providing more user control is interesting to enable end-users to help steer the recommendation process with additional input and feedback. However, different users may have different preferences with regard to such control. To the best of our knowledge, no research has investigated the effect of personal characteristics on visual control techniques in the music recommendation domain. In this paper, we present results of a user study on the web using two different visualisation techniques (a radar chart and sliders) that allows users to control Spotify recommendations. A within-subject design withLatin Square counterbalancing measures was used for the study. Results indicate that the radar chart helped the participants discover a significantly higher number of new songs compared to the sliders. We also found that users' experience with Spotify had an influence on their interaction with different musical attributes. The participants who used Spotify frequently and users with a high individual musical sophistication interacted with the attributes significantly more with the radar chart compared to the sliders. Individual musical sophistication also had a significant impact on their interaction with the interaction techniques. The participants with high musical sophistication interacted significantly more with the radar chart in comparison to the sliders. Based on the feedback from our participants, we provide design suggestions to further improve user control in music recommendation.

Targeted advertising reaches users based on various traits, such as demographics or behaviour. However, users are often reluctant to accept ads. We hypothesise that users are more open to targeted advertising if they can inspect, control and thereby understand the process of ad selection. We conducted a between-subjects study (N=200) to investigate to what extent four key aspects of ads (Quality, Behavioural Intention, Understanding and Attitude) may be affected by transparency and user control using a flow chart. Our results indicate that positive effects of flow charts reported from other domains may also be applicable to advertising: Using flow charts to provide transparency together with user control is found to have more positive effects on domain-specific quality measures than established, text-based approaches and using either of the techniques in isolation. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners aiming to improve user response to ads.