Information Exploration in E-Commerce Databases

Abstract

Many e-commerce sites struggle to present their data to users in an easily accessible manner, especially when the users have limited knowledge of what is contained in their database or lack technical expertise to form proper queries. Faceted navigation is a central tool that these e-commerce sites use to address this challenge. A typical faceted interface has two main component panels: a query panel and a result panel. Faceted browsing is primarily designed to help users quickly get to a specific item if they know the characteristics they are looking for. However, limitations in the query and the result panel deter effective faceted browsing, especially for users unfamiliar with the data. In this paper, we study why users are not able to explore e-commerce databases. We identify five limitations in the query and result panel that deter exploratory search using faceted browsing. We propose nine add-on extensions--four in the query panel and five in the result panel--to address these limitations.