[Sigia-l] Visual shopping

[Dmitry Nekrasovski]

On 2/28/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Shh. I didn't want to bring it up at this stage :-) but, of course. As I
> asked in my previous post, if execution issues were eliminated, is a
> zoomable UI appropriate for shopping?

If the shopping experience in question can benefit from 2D spatial
mapping of items and progressive disclosure of detail as the user
zooms in, I don't see why not. I can't think of one that meets these
criteria off the top of my head, but it's possible.

> Especially on a small-screen device?

Small-screen devices and zoomable interfaces are not mutually
incompatible. Ben Bederson's group at the University of Maryland, for
instance, has done some nice work at the intersection of the two with
their DateLens scheduling tool:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/

(On a side note, Bederson was also one of the people who came up with
the infinitely zoomable multiscale UI paradigm that's used in the
Raskin visualization mentioned by Jonathan:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192435)

Dmitry