Usability Tests of Recommendation and Dynamic Packaging Systems Part Two: Experimental Test of the trip@dvice Prototype

The Workpackage WP5 of ANET’s etPackaging Project provides foundations for construct-ing and improving automated dynamic packaging (DP) services. Report D5.1 introduced and ex-plained the trip@advice functionality that is used for operating a recommender system prototype for the ANTO-Austrian National Tourist Organization (Mahmood et al., 2008). Reports D5.2 and D5.3 further expanded the system architecture analyzed tourists actual product bundling behaviour and performed preliminary testing of travel portals that claim to provide DP services. Deliverable D5.4 comes in three pieces. The group of Prof. Ricci analysed the user-generated log data while navigating through the recommender system (see the evaluation results in ECCA-D5.4-FUB-V1). Part A of the WU group D5.4 report complemented the series of DP portal testing with two more pilot studies. Part B now concludes the empirical work with the results gained in the usability before-after experiment conducted for the ANTO trip@advice prototype.
Using the R system (http://cran.r-project.org/) and SPSS the two co-authors analysed the data independently of each other to ascertain maximal faithfulness of the results and conclusions.