DATA607: Recommender Systems

Alexis Mekueko

11/5/2020

Week 11 Discussion: Recommender Systems

Your task is to analyze an existing recommender system that you find interesting. You should:

  1. Perform a Scenario Design analysis as described below. Consider whether it makes sense for your selected recommender system to perform scenario design twice, once for the organization (e.g. Amazon.com) and once for the organization’s customers.

  2. Attempt to reverse engineer what you can about the site, from the site interface and any available information that you can find on the Internet or elsewhere.

  3. Include specific recommendations about how to improve the site’s recommendation capabilities going forward.

  4. Create your report using an R Markdown file, and create a discussion thread with a link to the GitHub repo where your Markdown file notebook resides. You are not expected to need to write code for this discussion assignment.

Gmail Recommender System

Gmail is one of the Google popular products used by 1.8 billion users. Gmail is an email account service that Google offers freely to millions of users. In addtion to free email account, Google allocaed 15GB of digital storage for free which can include any other account one might have such as Google Drive, Google Photos. I chose Gmail because I use it almost every day for email communication and I think many other users out do as well.

Scenario Analysis

Improving Gmail Recommender System

Google has been doing a lot of work in upgrading the Gmail account services. However, there is still that little habit of “developer display” as shown on picture above. No all user have developer approach when it comes to emailing. I think Google can create 03 instance of service: basic, intermediate and advance. For each instance, Google can demmonstrate in a pdf format or youtube video what users can expect in term of usability.

For example, the basic account:

The Gmail training and help should be simplified to written and graphic or video instructions.

For example, having a cheat sheets is the assumption user is trying to perform an operation and cannot remember the correct way. This is typical for developer not for users who simply want to send, read and manage email. I think giving option to users to choose the account level will remove the extra or unecessary work.

References

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+many+people+use+gmail

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-free-up-storage-space-in-gmail/