[Sigia-l] Visual shopping

[Ziya Oz]

Paola Kathuria:

> They need to know:
> 
>   a) where they are (in context / by category)
>   b) how much they've seen
>   c) how much more there is left to do/browse/examine
>   d) they haven't wandered off somewhere else inadvertently

I have an utterly blind spot for shopping. Either it takes me months to get
something or just a few minutes and I'm done. Anything in between is torture
for me; often I get woozy at malls, for example, and I can't believe I'm the
only one who's not properly wired for the western shopping process.

So I don't know if there's something peculiar about the experience of
shopping that involves physical or virtual navigation, parsing, orientation,
etc, that may be different than document or data navigation, for instance.

We can make some observations: Yahoo's directories lost to Google's flat
architecture to the tune of $138 billion. People apparently prefer
non-hierarchical navigation to highly structured and exposed navigation. It
may or may not be less efficient, but it doesn't seem to deter hundreds of
millions of people using it without too much of a problem. (Yes, I'm aware
that Google is not perfect :-)

The absence of navigational cues may in fact be problematic, just as you
say, but then again it may not matter as much if navigation is task/workflow
(and not browsing) based.

Frankly, I am in awe of people (often ladies) who can be let loose in what's
otherwise a bewildering maze to me, like a mall, and come back in an hour
with a perfectly suitable choice, if not a great one.

----
Ziya

Any system that is useful will have to be modified.