OntoNavShop: An Ontology-Based Approach for Web-Shop Navigation

Existing literature shows that navigation and visualization features play a significant role
in successful Web shop design. Traditional Web shops, however, often lack a uniform, intuitive interface to navigate through products, while also providing an insightful overview
of the product assortment. In this article, we employ ontologies for the presentation of
product assortments in Web shops in order to ease the users’ process of finding their
desired products. OntoNavShop visualizes the product assortment ontology directly in
a Web browser using a circular view algorithm that outputs SVG graphics. Consumers
can navigate uniformly through the ontology and zoom into its categories. The visualisation is evaluated on efficiency, user satisfaction, and specific problems against a classical
tree-based Web shop. Our evaluations under a representative group of users show that
users maintain a better overview of the structure of the product assortment, while being
able to find products more quickly (i.e., less time) and more efficiently (i.e., less clicks)
than in our benchmark Web shop. The participants prefer the OntoNavShop over the
classical approach, and the identified problems are rather minor.