Shopping Garden

Overview

Shopping Garden began in 2000/2001 as an idea for improving online shopping, which is described here, but eventually found its way on to the Tate Gallery website as a way of browsing their online collection (http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/carousel).

Shopping online can be frustrating. This stems from the failure of current online shopping sites to create a more pleasurable browsing shopping experience. Asking shoppers to use text-based search, or requiring them to find the right category and sub-category for the item they want, removes the possibility of browsing and impulse purchases. People who do not understand, or concur with, the categories into which the online shop is organised will often fail to find an item to buy even when they have a good idea of what they are after in advance. This is further compounded when the shopper does not have a clear idea ahead of time, but wishes to move towards a decision to purchase based on experience of what the shop has to offer.

Shopping Garden shows shoppers random items from the shop's catalogue and allows the shopper to reward or punish the items they are shown. On the basis of these interactions the random presentation of items is biased so that the shopper is shown more of what they like as time goes by. This mode of navigation returns the browsing to the shopping experience. The shopper helps steer the browsing process without recourse to explicit search strings or categories.

This approach is not limited to shopping. Any browsing of a large range of items, particularly where the features or categories items are hard to describe in words, can be done the ShoppingGarden way! Indeed, with ShoppingGarden it is possible for a user to search through a catalogue without even speaking the same language as the catalogue owner.

An example

Here is an example where the ShoppingGarden technology is used for choosing a holiday.

The aim is to let a user set about choosing a holiday without having to describe what they want, indeed without even knowing what they want! Their job is simply to watch the pictures being presented, and click on the ones they like.

The nine pictures are updated one by one at regular intervals. Initially the next picture is chosen at random from the collection, but as soon as the user clicks on a picture, the selection of 'next picture to display' is biased to show more things related to pictures the user has 'rewarded'.

A range of holiday offers scrolls along the bottom of the screen, and these too are presented initially at random, but then are skewed towards the user's preference.

Contributors