An interactive exploratory search system for on-line apparel shopping

Many people (especially women) tend to take relatively longer time for shopping. This paper presents a system for product retrieval inspired by psychology of women's shopping activity, and an implementation of the system for apparel products. Our study supposes products which pre-defined keywords are assigned, and prepares icons representing the combination of the keywords. The system intuitively displays various icons in a display space to demonstrate the diversity of the products. When a user selects an interested icon, the system switches the display to a set of images corresponding to the selected icon, so that the user can visually compare the similar products. The system also features user interfaces to input the preference of users, and reflects the input to the evolutionary computation which adjusts the selection of icons to their preferences. It acts real shopping behavior because we often firstly look over the shops to understand the diversity of products, and then close up the particular groups of the products. This paper introduces an experiment which demonstrates the preferable assistance of the shopping behavior of women who are interested in various products.