[Sigia-l] To sort or not to sort

[Billie Mandel]

Hi Mark et al - 

A bit more fuel (or fodder) for your fire:  my current project is a
corporate intranet for a 500-person nonprofit, and is also part of a
knowledge management initiative.  I had the opportunity to do some
feature enhancements based on user feedback, which included a new search
engine and page sorting options.  
 
For my users, at least, I found that they only needed sort options for
their browse pages, not their search results.  For browsing, the default
is to display in reverse chronological order by date of posting, but
they also needed to sort by title and by author, both ascending and
descending.  

For search results, however, they just wanted to see summary details as
succinctly as possible, to be able to parse their results list and
determine which item most fit their search.  So no sort options on the
results page.  We did provide a "narrow your search" option to help
users drill down.

I agree completely with the person (can't remember whom - sorry) who
suggested that you break the results up in groupings - ours are grouped
by content type (documents, images etc), and then listed by relevance
within each category.  However, the categories into which you group the
results will obviously differ based on what business processes you're
modeling with your system.  What is that customer service rep trying to
do with the content for which s/he is searching?  

Is there someone who can tell you what needs the system and the search
feature are being created to fulfill?  Without that kind of context, I
can't imagine how they'd expect you to be able to accurately evaluate
the effectiveness of a design.  

Hope this helps, 

- Billie
 

>>> "FelcanSmith, Mark" <mfelc at allstate.com> 2/23/2005 11:11:17 AM >>>


> Sarah Ockler wrote:
>
> Can you give any examples of what types of searches the users would
be
> performing in your example, or why they would want or need a sort
> option?
> 

2nd part of your question first...I don't have a clear understanding
of
why they might want to do the sorting. I'm new on this, and really
only
reviewing these designs, but I haven't been able to do any task
analysis
w/ users to determine if a sort is even needed here.

This search is part of a knowledge management project, initial users
are
customer service reps who are searching on financial product
information
(both active and discontinued products), associated forms, rate
sheets,
disclosures, performance history, and more...

There are filter options provided up front; type - resource/product,
subtype - longer lists based on type selection, and channel - which
business unit does the product fall under.

Results are returned in a tabular format w/ column headers:
Title/Description, Subtype/Date, and File Type.

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