[Sigia-l] examples of well designed directories

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 10:45 AM 9/11/2002 -0400, Samantha Bailey wrote:

>I have two sets of questions:
>*What are the examples of the best directories you've seen out there and
>why? Do they tend to function as scrolling menus, onion layered menus,
>other?
>
>*Is anyone aware of research around directory structure/functionality?

Many, many years ago, Cognetics worked on a public messaging system for a 
large banking conference. It worked on touch-screen kiosks, which did not 
have scrolling. One of the design challenges was to find a way to quickly 
navigate to a specific name using an alphabetic directory. (I was not on 
this project, but the design was used for several years).

The solution was two and a half levels deep.

Level 1 was a set of A-Z touch points.
Level 2 was a set of AA - AZ (BA - BZ, CA-CZ, etc) touch points
(the system knew which combinations did not have any records associated 
with them, and those touch points were disabled)
Selecting a touch point in Level 2 took you to an alphabetical list of 
names. If there were more than the 10 or so that would fit on one screen, 
there were page buttons to move through the list.

In the visual design, the Level 1 and Level 2 touch points were represented 
as a two column set of tabs on the right-hand side. I can't remember if the 
previous "level" of alpha options was displayed, or if you had to use a 
back button.

The closest physical metaphor I can think of  is an old-fashioned phone 
book that my grandmother used to have. You moved a level on the right side 
to position it opposite the letter you wanted and pressed down to open the 
cover to the right level, but could have more than one sheet of names 
within each letter.

The point was that it was very fast (two touches) to get very close to the 
target name, and no name was more than 4 touches away.

Interestingly, the fact that this was an international conference helped 
minimize the number of Level 2 combinations with more than one page, 
because so many language were represented.



Whitney Quesenbery
whitneyq at acm.org
Usability Professionals' Association - www.upassoc.org
STC Usability SIG - www.stcsig.org/usability/
Cognetics Corporation - www.cognetics.com