Conceptual Design of Electronic Product Catalogs Using Object-Oriented Hypermedia Modeling Techniques

The application of conceptual models that assure both the consistency and usability of Electronic Product Catalogs (EPC's) is a main concern in the e-commerce community, mainly due to the impact a correct design of such interfaces has on the final e-store sales figures. This article describes how the OO-H Method web-interface modeling approach can be successfully applied to the design of Business to Consumer (B2C) application interfaces. In order to address the specific domain semantics, OO-H Method adds a new concept called 'dimension attribute', which is extracted from the datawarehouse field, and defines a comparison function applicable to these attributes. Also, a set of e-commerce Interface Usability Patterns that address some design problems likely to appear on the different store components and a materialization strategy are introduced to complete our proposal. The use of patterns to capture the semantics specifically related to e-commerce applications, and to manage the knowledge captured in the catalog structure, guarantees the reuse of techniques coming from different fields and proven useful for the increment of sales on internet.