The display of electronic commerce within virtual environments

In today’s competitive business environment, the majority of companies are expected to be represented on the Internet in the form of an electronic commerce site. In an effort to keep up with current business trends, certain aspects of interface design such as those related to navigation and perception may be overlooked. For instance, the manner in which a visitor to the site might perceive the information displayed or the ease with which they navigate through the site may not be taken into consideration. This paper reports on the evaluation of the electronic commerce sites of three different companies, focusing specifically on the human factors issues such as perception and navigation. Heuristic evaluation, the most popular method for investigating user interface design, is the technique employed to assess each of these sites. In light of the results from the analysis of the evaluation data, virtual environments are suggested as a way of improving the navigation and perception display constraints

Supporting Memorization and Problem Solving with Spatial Information Presentations in Virtual Environments

While it has been suggested that immersive virtual environments could provide benefits for educational applications, few studies have formally evaluated how the enhanced perceptual displays of such systems might improve learning. Using simplified memorization and problem-solving tasks as representative approximations of more advanced types of learning, we are investigating the effects of providing supplemental spatial information on the performance of learning-based activities within virtual environments. We performed two experiments to investigate whether users can take advantage of a spatial information presentation to improve performance on cognitive processing activities. In both experiments, information was presented either directly in front of the participant or wrapped around the participant along the walls of a surround display. In our first experiment, we found that the spatial presentation caused better performance on a memorization and recall task. To investigate whether the advantages of spatial information presentation extend beyond memorization to higher level cognitive activities, our second experiment employed a puzzle-like task that required critical thinking using the presented information. The results indicate that no performance improvements or mental workload reductions were gained from the spatial presentation method compared to a non-spatial layout for our problem-solving task. The results of these two experiments suggest that supplemental spatial information can support performance improvements for cognitive processing and learning-based activities, but its effectiveness is dependent on the nature of the task and a meaningful use of space