Lecture#06

Outline

Enhancing User Experience Why it is important? Discussing user experience one-by-

one

Ouline

Allowing customers to search our product catalog effectively

Enhancing this search by allowing our customers to filter products

Providing wish lists for our customers Generating recommendations for

customers based on previous purchases Informing customers when their desired

products are back in stock Enabling social aspects such as product

ratings and reviews from customers

Why Customer Experience?

Find out popular and wanted products

Analyze customer trends Planning e-commerce products Customers know merits and

demerits of any products Helps to increases revenue and sales Improves customer satisfactionTo enhance customer experience

facilitate customers as more as you can

Search

Search and filter products is vital in framework

Why? If they cannot fid what they are looking for

▪ Customer will be frustrated by our site▪ Go somewhere where they can fid what they are

looking for much more easily There are two methods of search

Keyword Search: search based on keywords Filtering: Search based on listing product

attributes

Keyword Search

Based on Keywords

Applies all metadata and complex algorithms to the

search

More complex, because you have to rank the best

results first

No matter how data model is?

Answers to 20% of users needs to find

Filtered Search

Based on product multiple attributes

Filter criteria should correlate with the data

model.

Known as Advance Search

Answers to 80% of users needs to find

Search Implementation

Easy way is to search the keywords from product name and product description fields

To make the results more relevant We can place different priorities

▪ Result is more valid if keyword is in both fields▪ Is also valid if keyword is in name field▪ Least valid is if keyword is in description field

We need following 3-things Search Box: to type keyword to search Search Feature in Controller: code for searching Search Result: template for viewing search

results

Search Box-Template

Search Box-Controller

Mytasks.net

Mytasks.net/view

Mytasks.net/search

Mytasks.net/someelse

Our Search Function

Working of search function is as given: Customer has actually entered some

phrase to search Clean the search phrase Run the query from database Name and Description is checked with

search phrase Show priorities results SearchFunction.php

Search Results-Template

Improving Search Results

We can improve our search result by changing our search template

Filtering Products

Filtering allow customers to better find the products they are looking for

Filtering products are based on product attributes Like price ranges, manufacturer, weight,

brands etc. Price range filtering is simple enough But with product attributes, we would

need To extend the database and models to

maintain this additional information

Filtering Products

There are different ways in which we can store filtered results:

In the user's session: This will be lost when the user closes their browser

In a cookie: This information will stay when the user closes their browser

In the URL: This would allow the customer to filter results and send the link of those results to a friend

In POST data: The information will only be stored for the one instance thefilter is used

Store Filtering Results in URL We are trying URL method We format filter data within the URL as

filter/attribute-type/attribute-value-ID For example for two attributes, URL can be:

Domain.com/filter/price/5/filter/weight/6 How it will work?

we can simply iterate through the bits of the URL find bits containing filter then take the next two parts of the URL Filter down(query to DB) the product based on

parts

Database Changes for Filtering We need three new tables to for effective

product filtering An attribute types table:

To manage types of attributes; for example, price,weight, brand, manufacturer, color, and so on

An attribute values table To manage values and ranges of attributes; for

example, <$5, $5 - $10,<5 KG, Nike, Adidas, gold, red, and so on

An associations table To associate products with attribute values

Attribute Type Table

Attribute Values Table

Attribute Values Table

Attribute Association Table This table will have only two fields

Product ID and Attribute ID

Filter Options

To enable Filtering in framework we need to Build a list of attributes Build suitable URLs based on the attributes Display them within the product list view

We need nested loops One for generating headings and empty lists 2nd to insert the loops of values into these

lists

Filter Options

Step-by-step process for filtering options We query the database for attribute types We cache the results of this query The cache is associated with a template tag

▪ Building empty list and showing on template We query the database for all attribute types We iterate through the results, putting each

value into an array for its corresponding attribute type

For each attribute type, we cache the array, and assign it to a template tag

Filtering Product Template

Improving Filters

Displaying the number of products matching a filter next to it

Pagination—limiting the number of products displayed on a page

Filter options with no matching products could be hidden