E-commerce Site Classification System To Understand User Mental Model

For the e-commerce sites, the goal of web design is to attract more users to patronize, one of the important factors is the organization of information on the site. To what extent the web interface can make users understandable and accepted, how users can quickly find needed information without "Being lost", and are willing to continue with the web interface, call for the analysis of the internal mental model which determines users'information behavior. Therefore, the study proposed in this paper is of great theoretical significance to the optimization of information organization as well as information architecture on the websites.Firstly, this paper reviews related concepts of mental models, including mental model studied in different areas, and mental models research status at home and abroad; secondly, the paper summed up categories of individuals'mental models the researchers got from domestic and outside, made efforts to collate and summarize the measurement methods of mental model. Then the paper used related theory to reveal the mechanism of information understanding on web classification system.Finally, the study took e-commerce site classification system for instance; concept map method and card sorting method were used to design two experiments:the users' understanding on the demand for commodities, as well as users' understanding on the overall classification system. The experiments were tested for measuring the difference between implementation model of websites and mental model of users. In that way, this paper could provide theoretical support for building websites that is in line with users' mental models.