CHI 99 SIG: user interfaces for electronic product catalogs

Abstract

Online shopping over the World-Wide Web has become a major commercial application in 1998 and volume is rapidly growing. At the same time usability of these sites is a serious problem as significant numbers of users (I/2 2/3, depending on study) fail to find what they are looking for. A number of HCI techniques, tools, and methods are used to design, realize, and evaluate new forms of interaction to address this problem. Electronic Product Catalog (EPC) Interfaces are an interesting application area for a wide range of HCI research, including human searching and browsing in complex hypermedia spaces, information visualization, virtual reality, agent support, user modeling, and group-oriented work such as recommender systems.