[sigia-l] Faceted browsing WAS The category of "Miscellaneous"

[Donna Maurer]

On 16 Jun 2004 at 2:54, Jonathan Broad wrote:

> Endeca has an excellent commercial implementation of faceted 
> search/browsing.  The Flamenco project headed by Marti Hearst of 
> Berkeley's Info School has an open-sourced implementation of a similar 
> interface.
> 
> For one thing, that kind of interface eliminates the dead-ends of 
> directories.  For another, it re-homes relevant structure dynamically 
> in response to a user query.  
> 
Having spent my day up to my elbows in faceted browsing (which also 
involved creating a new page on the IAwiki: 
http://iawiki.net/FacetedBrowsing), I wonder why you think that it 
eliminates the dead ends.

All of the current implementations of faceted browsing I have found 
purposely lead to dead ends. Faceted browsing is a filter, and a filter 
is a funnel that progressively narrows the number of results down.  
You browse through the facets until you find a product/page that is 
interesting. Although it would be simple to use the facets to create 
relationships (and eliminate dead ends by expanding the results), I 
haven't seen this done at all.


So a request and a blatant plug...

If you know of sites that use faceted browsing, email me (have a look 
at the page mentioned above on the IAwiki for a definition). I'll update 
the wiki. 

And if you are in Australia, come see me talk about faceted browsing, 
the shape of information, personas and other cool things at our new 
half-day seminar "Latest Thinking in Usability & IA":
http://steptwo.com.au/seminars/040729/index.html
(told you it was a blatant plug ;)


Donna

-- 
Donna Maurer
blog: http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/
work: http://steptwo.com.au/
AOL IM: maadmob