[Sigia-l] Online Product Selectors

[Mitchell Gass]

At 05:58 AM 10/22/2004, O'Neill, Todd mentioned this product selector for 
Dell notebook computers:
>http://catalog.us.dell.com/advisor/advise.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=04&~ck=mn

Thanks Todd! This has some interesting features:

- When you choose a parameter value, values of other parameters that are no 
longer available are grayed. For example, if I choose "Highly demanding 
applications" as my expected notebook usage, all the display sizes except 
15.4" are grayed.

- When you mouse over an illustration of a notebook, the parameter values 
that apply to it are indicated by shading around the values. For example, I 
can quickly move my mouse pointer over all the illustrations and see the 
price range and available screen sizes for each.

The restriction of parameter values to those that are available seems to 
work well with the small number of parameters. I make a change to one 
parameter and notice that values of others become unavailable. It would be 
interesting to see if this approach scales to products that have more 
parameters that customers would want to specify. Is it possible that 
someone exploring different possible combinations would become frustrated 
at having to change a different parameter in order to restore available 
values for another?

Thanks again!

Mitchell Gass
uLab | PDA: Learning from Users | Designing with Users
Berkeley, CA 94707 USA
+1 510 525-6864 voice
+1 510 525-4246 fax
http://www.participatorydesign.com/