Opportunistic Exploration of Large Consumer Product Spaces

The advent of the Web has brought an unprecedented amount of information together with a large, diverse set of users. Online users are performing a wider variety of tasks than ever before. For example, not only is the Web being used to search conventional databases like Lexis/Nexus, it is also being used to broker Beanie Babies® . Today’s common information seeking metaphors (i.e., keyword search and hypertext) cannot be expected to support all these new tasks well. We characterize a new user behavior called opportunistic exploration. We show how it is significantly different than both browsing and searching. A novel visual metaphor for opportunistic exploration, an aquarium, is presented. In an aquarium users may explore a large corpus at any level of granularity. The aquarium’s implementation is discussed and demonstrated on a collection of 12,000 consumer products. The implementation automatically controls granularity based on the history of operations performed by a user. Key...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Doug Bryan, Anatole Gershman
• Keywords: Information Seeking Metaphors, IUI 1999, Opportunistic Exploration, Software Engineering, Visual Metaphor