Design and Evaluation Issues for User-centric Online Product Search

Nowadays more and more people are looking for products online and a massive amount of products have been sold through e-commerce systems. It is crucial to develop effective online product search tools to assist users to find the desired products and to make sound purchase decisions. Currently most existing online product search tools are not very effective in helping users because they ignore the fact that users only have limited knowledge and computational capacity to process the product information. For example, a search tool may ask users to fill in a form with many questions, and return search results either with a large list of products that the system has, or with no available product at all. Such system-centric designs of online product search tools may cause some serious problems to end-users. Most of the time users are unable to state all their preferences at one time, so the search results may not be very accurate. In addition, users can either be impatient to view too much product information, or feel lost with no product appeared in the search results during the interaction process. User-centric online product search tools can be developed to solve these problems and to help users make buying decisions effectively. The search tool should have the ability to recommend suitable products to meet the user’s various preferences. In addition, it should help the user navigate the product space and reach the final target product without too much effort. Furthermore, according to behavior decision theory, users are likely to construct their preferences during the decision process, so the tool should be designed in an interactive way to elicit users’ preferences gradually. Moreover, it should be decision supportive for users to make right purchasing decisions even if they don’t have detail domain knowledge of the specific products. To develop effective user-centric online product search tools, one important task