An exploratory apparel product search interface adopting shopping psychology

抄録

Many people (especially women) tend to take a long time for shopping. From the results of our preliminary questionnaire, we conclude that many female students look many products to find the best product, while enjoying the shopping processes themselves. This paper presents a user interface for exploratory apparel product search inspired by the questionnaire results. Our study supposes that each product is assigned with a pre-defined keyword, and prepares icons associated to the combination of the keywords. The interface displays various icons in a display space to show the diversity of the products. The icons are generated in the preprocessing. They are designed specific to this study, as the overlay of images representing shapes, colors, and texture patterns of the products. When a user selects an interested icon, the interface switches the display to a set of images corresponding to the selected icon, such that the user can visually compare the similar products. It acts real shopping behavior because we often firstly look over the shops to understand the diversity of products, and then close up the particular groups of the products. The interface also estimates the preferences of users from their selection of icons, and applies an evolutionary computation algorithm which adjusts the selection of icons to their preferences. This paper introduces a user experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented interface, and discusses how the interface adopts to (especially women's) shopping psychology.