[Sigia-l] Visual shopping

[Dmitry Nekrasovski]

Jonathan,

Perhaps I should have expressed myself better in my earlier email - I
can't say for certain that such a concept won't work.

What I do know is that the treemap visualization paradigm works best
when item size is used to emphasize a particular quantitative
attribute of the dataset - for example, market capitalization of
stocks in http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/, or file size in a
filesystem visualization.

As far as I can tell, the attribute of the dataset that's being
emphasized in the browsegoods.com visualization is the number of items
the site offers in a particular category. This doesn't seem to me to
be a particularly important concern for most shoe shoppers.

Other possible emphasized attributes that come to mind are price (if
the designer wants to feature the most expensive - or cheapest -
shoes) and recency of addition to the catalog (a la Etsy time
machine). But again, neither seems like a very compelling way to
structure a shoe shopping experience.

Dmitry

On 3/2/07, Jonathan Baker-Bates <Jonathan.Baker-Bates at lbi.com> wrote:
> I'm intrigued as to where you get your confidence in saying that it's
> not a good way to visualize an online shoe store. I can see it's
> sub-optimal, slow, and in other ways poorly executed. But then I see
> what I regard as sub-optimal UI all over the place which is also quite
> often very popular with a very large user base.
>
> So, as a concept (as opposed to an execution of that), how do you know
> it won't work?