Faceted search or guided navigation has become remarkedly popular at e-commerce sites and is seen often as a feature of auto-classification at some metasearch engines (eg ISeek.com).
This article describes faceted search and related trends, and shares five do's and don'ts on designing for faceted search.
"The power of faceted search lies in the ability of users to create their own custom navigation by combining various perspectives rather than forcing them through a specific path. Think of a cookbook: Authors have to organize the recipes in one way only—by course or by main ingredient, etc.—and users have to work with whatever choice of organizing principle that has been made, regardless of how it fits their particular style of searching. An online recipe site using faceted search can allow users to decide how they’d like to navigate to a specific recipe, offering multiple entry points and successive refinements. Figure 1 on page 15 (KMWorld, Vol 18 #3) shows how facets can help pinpoint content very precisely through the combination of perspectives. Just three facets with five terms each can represent 243 possible combinations."
Note: diagrams not available online.
No comments:
Post a Comment