[Sigia-l] To sort or not to sort

[Ockler, Sarah]

Hi Mark,

We are in the final stages of design for our health plan member Web site
(4/15 launch) which offers 3 different search scenarios:

1)  Search entire site for a particular keyword or phrase.
2)  Search provider directory for a doctor or hospital based on required
(member plan type, doctor specialty and location) and optional (doctor
gender, languages spoken, doctor name) criteria.
3)  Search past medical, dental and vision claims for you and the family
members covered on your plan.

Based on the results from our usability tests and member feedback on our
existing site, we've designed each search interaction differently:

1)  Site search - sorted by relevance with no user sort option.  
2)  Provider directory - as part of the search criteria before hitting
submit, user is offered "sort results by" option of alphabetical by last
name or random display (some members prefer random for larger searches
rather than getting all the "A" names first).
3)  Claims search - this is the most complex of the searches since
members can search by family member name (or all), claim type (or all),
date of medical service (or date range, or all), claim status (e.g.
processed, pended, denied or all), provider name or any combination of
these fields.  In this case, there is a default sort, but then members
can resort the results by any of the above criteria by clicking the
appropriate column header.  

The sort works well in the last example because a user's needs for the
data may change with each search.  For example, one day he might want to
see how many vision claims his family had in 2004.  Next time he may
want to see how many claims he had for Dr. Smith.  Or he may have had
some sick kids in December and want to view the claims just for that
month.  Or he may want to see which claims were denied over the past 2
years.

# 3 is the only situation on our site where a sort by option is relevant
and useful.  It truly depends on what sort of data you're dealing with
and whether a user will have different needs for the same data each
time.  Other instances where I think a user-defined sort works well
include shopping (sort by product name, price, category), library (sort
by title, author, publication type, publication year), bank (sort by
date, transaction type, transaction amount, payee), apartment search
(sort by rent, # of rooms, neighborhood).

If user defined sort doesn't work well for your site, you may consider
offering additional search criteria to help narrow the results (like
Google's "results in English only" or product searches within a specific
price range).  You can also offer users a "sort results by" option as
part of the search criteria.

~Sarah
_______________________________________________


-----Original Message-----
From: FelcanSmith, Mark
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 8:45 AM
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] To sort or not to sort

<snip>
The gist of the question is really this: has anyone implemented sort for
searches that are done based on relevancy? If so, can you explain the
value...both in terms of usability and user experience?