The term Social Navigation captures every-day behaviour used to find information, people, and places -namely through watching, following, and talking to people. We discuss how to design information spaces to allow for social navigation. We applied our ideas in a recipe recommendation system. In a follow-up user study, subjects state that social navigation adds value to the service: it provides for social affordance, and it helps turning a space into a social place. The study also reveals some unresolved design issues, such as the snowball effect where more and more users follow each other down the wrong path, and privacy issues.

No abstract

Recent research in the area of information retrieval hypothesizes that people benefit from social clues, so called social navigation, when they try to navigate information spaces [7]. We have designed an on-line grocery store building upon those ideas manifested in several different ways. The most central feature is that the system uses a combination of content-based and collaborative filtering as the basis for recipe recommendations. This filtering process can in turn be controlled by editors, whose role is to control the content of the "recipe clubs". Other types of social clues are also present, such as displaying how many users that have chosen a recipe. Finally, the system shows information about other users currently present in the system, and allows users to get in direct contact through chat.

No abstract