Alternative ecommerce interface

Software	Object oriented server side language, HTML+CSS+ECMAscript or similar, probably non-relational database
Covers	Programming, interface design.
Skills Required	Programming, interest in ecommerce, possibly interest in consumer psychology.
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

This proposal was inspired by a MSc project by Lorna Walsh.

We're all very familiar with ecommerce systems that work like Amazon. However, Amazon isn't a very close match to the kind of user experience we have when we go food shopping in a supermarket, even though its interface design is based on the supermarket interface metaphor. Of course, there's no reason why it should be. But many ecommerce interfaces aren't great for allowing you to browse and impulse buy, and look at products conceptually related to what you're currently looking at but not in quite the same category.

The challenge of this project is to design and implement a way of interacting with an ecommerce system that provides a user experience that offers a user experience that's a bit different, and ideally gets a bit closer to the kind of visual search behaviour that works very well for us in physical shops (a lot of the time - what about the other times?). What do you show? How do you show it? How do you enable people to navigate through the space of products that the store sells?

Extensions

Ideally, the system would implement the full shopping experience including the payment process. However, you might prefer to prioritize working on other aspects of the project.

Ideally this project would include a running prototype. However a sufficiently sophisticated analysis of the problem and a testable paper prototype of a radical system design might add up to a good project.

A serious analysis of how you might describe products and implement the relationships between them in some form of database, so that this fits different kinds of product searching and exploration behaviour, and how you can keep a product database considering different kinds of relationships updated, might make the kernel of an interesting project, when your user interface doesn't look particularly different from standard ecommerce systems.

Variants

Food shopping is probably the situation where the online shopping experience is furthest from the way many people want to go and look for stuff (other than clothing they can try on). But you might want to consider some other shopping situation where the ecommerce systems you find don't do what some customers might want.

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