Improving Usability of User Centric Decision Making of Multi-Attribute Products on E-commerce Websites
This addresses usability challenges for e-commerce shoppers optimizing multiple product attributes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of users struggling to find suitable multi-attribute products on e-commerce sites by proposing a visualization-based interface that helps them shortlist and select products efficiently. Results from a controlled experiment showed that the interface allowed users to find desired products quickly and correctly, with higher satisfaction compared to a typical e-commerce interface.
The high number of products available makes it difficult for a user to find the most suitable products according to their needs. This problem is especially exacerbated when the user is trying to optimize multiple attributes during product selection, e.g. memory size and camera resolution requirements in case of smartphones. Previous studies have shown that such users search extensively to find a product that best meets their needs. In this paper, we propose an interface that will help users in selecting a multi-attribute product through a series of visualizations. This interface is especially targeted for users that desire to purchase the best possible product according to some criteria. The interface works by allowing the user to progressively shortlist products and ultimately select the most appropriate product from a very small consideration set. We evaluated our proposed interface by conducting a controlled experiment that empirically measures the efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of our visualization based interface and a typical e-commerce interface. The results showed that our proposed interface allowed the user to find a desired product quickly and correctly, moreover, the subjective opinion of the users also favored our proposed interface.