Bookwall: An Online Bookstore Interface Based on User Experience in Physical Bookstore

In recent years, online bookstore has highly thrived and changed consumption behavior; nevertheless, most users usually browse the online bookstore only when they have a specific target to buy. They still enjoy visiting real bookstores. One of the reasons is that information on web bookstore is too complex for users to freely browse. In this paper, we present Bookwall, an online bookstore interface designed based on user experiences in physical bookstores. We proposed four designs in this work, including ``category map'', ``gathering similar books'', ``visualizing methodology to highlight wanted books'', and ``wall view''. Category map is used to solve the problem of spending time on finding the particular category in classic category list on web bookstore. Similar books, like the same topics, series, same manufacturers, same author, and etc., are arranged together in physical bookstore. Gathering resembling books together enables users have more similar choices to browse or compare with each book. Visualizing technique is to highlight merchandises which meet users'' demands. For instance, books with high score and massive number of reviews will have more area in the wall layout. In this case, if users want to find popular books, they can just focus on the books with large space. Modified from grid view, wall view hides basic information and only show book cover (unless the cursor is pointed to the book) so that it can display more books than traditional list view or grid view. These four designs are based on our observation and field study in physical bookstore, and we finally proposed an online bookstore interface which includes the above four designs to improve user experience in web bookstore and increase their intentions to browse online bookstore