A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Management, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2006

An online catalog is a web-based tool enabling merchants to display and sell their products to customers online. However, if the tool does not allow customers to rapidly find what they need or to accurately compare products, they are likely to make a poor choice or shop somewhere else. This research investigates the effectiveness of visual interfaces as tools for online catalogs, using the One Tambon One Product (OTOP) catalog as a case study. The first part of this research is a comparative analysis of previous techniques for visualizing multidimensional data sets, such as product catalogs. This analysis identified the strengths and weaknesses of current techniques in terms of supported tasks and visual representations. The second part is the design and implementation, which was influenced by the previous visualizations. Several designs were drawn and tested with few pilot studies before the final design was generated. An Interactive Spatial View with a shopping basket was the final design solution. This interface was primarily based on the idea of helping customers navigate and compare online catalog products effectively within a single page. The effectivenessofthis interface was measured with an empirical user study consisting of three types of tasks: comparison tasks, overall understanding of a collection, and an unstructured shopping task. The result of this experiment showed that although there were no substantial differences in user performance between the prototype and a more traditional tabular catalog with respect to time or accuracy, there users were significantly more confident and satisfied with the features and usability of the Interactive Spatial View. All eighteen participants were more satisfied with the spatial catalog even though it required learning a new and complex interface. In fact, it helped users navigate, analyze and compare attributes among items more easily. Dynamically filtering products with sliders and displaying product attributes through position and color were the main features assisting them to accomplish these tested tasks. In summary, the conventional tabular catalog could be replaced with an innovative spatial catalog that would give similar perfomlance but significantly higher user satisfaction.