Effective product selection in electronic catalogs

ABSTRACT

Product catalogs are crucial for electronic commerce on the Internet, but it is still a challenging task for casual users to perform effective product selection. Recently, a promising technique for product selection has been proposed: Incremental restriction on interactive tables. It allows customers to build complex queries with a few mouse clicks, but still to browse the available products at any stage. This paper describes effective and ineffective strategies of users working with this technique. These strategies were identified in a study with casual users.

REFERENCES

• 1: Christopher Ahlberg , Ben Shneiderman, Visual information seeking: tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.313-317, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191775]
• 2: Ramana Rao , Stuart K. Card, The table lens: merging graphical and symbolic representations in an interactive focus + context visualization for tabular information, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.318-322, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191776]
• 3: Michael Spenke , Christian Beilken , Thomas Berlage, FOCUS: the interactive table for product comparison and selection, Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.41-50, November 06-08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/237091.237097]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
electronic catalogs, product selection, user studies