A Visual Interface for Product Exploration on Online Shopping Websites

Most online shopping websites provide a customer interface that simply lists all products available to the user. The user can then scroll up and down to explore different options. Everyone that has shopped online is familiar with this interface type. However, there are drawbacks to list interfaces. There is no obvious relationship between any two products that are displayed right next to each other. This means that during exploration users cannot use the position of a product in the list to draw information about that product. Is there a different type of user interface that is more helpful for shopping for products? This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a novel two-dimensional visual shopping interface which arranges products on the display by similarity. The interface consists of an undirected graph with each node of the graph representing a different product. The products that are placed closer to one another can be assumed to be more similar, and those that are farther away are less similar. We propose that this new interface will be better for product exploration, because the user can now intuit information about a product based on where it is located on the screen and what products are next to it. We perform a user study to evaluate the claim that our interface is better.