Optimizing user exploring experience in emerging e-commerce products

E-commerce has emerged as a popular channel for Web users to conduct transaction over Internet. In e-commerce services, users usually prefer to discover information via querying over category browsing, since the hierarchical structure supported by category browsing can provide them a more effective and efficient way to find their interested properties. However, in many emerging e-commerce services, well-defined hierarchical structures are not always available; moreover, in some other e-commerce services, the pre-defined hierarchical structures are too coarse and less intuitive to distinguish properties according to users interests. This will lead to very bad user experience. In this paper, to address these problems, we propose a hierarchical clustering method to build the query taxonomy based on users' exploration behavior automatically, and further propose an intuitive and light-weight approach to construct browsing list for each cluster to help users discover interested items. The advantage of our approach is four folded. First, we build a hierarchical taxonomy automatically, which saves tedious human effort. Second, we provide a fine-grained structure, which can help user reach their interested items efficiently. Third, our hierarchical structure is derived from users' interaction logs, and thus is intuitive to users. Fourth, given the hierarchical structures, for each cluster, we present both frequently clicked items and retrieved results of queries in the category, which provides more intuitive items to users. We evaluate our work by applying it to the exploration task of a real-world e-commerce service, i.e. online shop for smart mobile phone's apps. Experimental results show that our clustering algorithm is efficient and effective to assist users to discover their interested properties, and further comparisons illustrate that the hierarchical topic browsing performs much better than existing category browsing approach (i.e. Android Market mobile apps category) in terms of information exploration.