Design and Implementation of a Multidimensional Zoomable Electronic Catalog

Consumers select products based on a combination of decision criteria and preferences, such as price, quality, appearance, origin, and popularity. However, current interfaces for electronic catalogs do not adequately support the multi-criteria searching, browsing, and comparison tasks typical of consumer "bargain hunting" behavior. This paper presents the design and implementation of a visual interface for a large electronic catalog that represents products as a collection of images in a compact, zoomable, multidimensional grid. At the overview level, the spatial dimensions represent the price and quality tradeoffs that typically guide buying behavior. As a user zooms into regions of interest, the spatial dimensions are overloaded to represent additional decision criteria, such as product category and ratings. An empirical evaluation found that users preferred this new visual interface to a traditional tabular interface on measures of confidence, usability, and satisfaction, especially for multi-criteria comparison tasks.