Deploying CommunityCommands: A Software Command Recommender System Case Study

This project continued to evolve and we explored the design space of a contextual software command recommender system and completed a six-week user study (Li et al. 2011). We then expanded the scope of our project by implementing CommunityCommands, a fully functional and deployable recommender system. During a one-year period, the recommender system was used by more than 1100 users. In this article, we discuss how our practical system architecture was designed to leverage Autodesk's existing customer involvement program (CIP) data to deliver in-product contextual recommendations to end users. We also present our system usage data and payoff, and provide an in-depth discussion of the challenges and design issues associated with developing and deploying the software command recommender system.