[Sigia-l] Great Examples of Faceted Navigation/Search

[Dan Wendling]

Hello, to what extent does kohls.com match your criteria? Such as For the Home > Shop by Category > Coffee Makers? I like that you can do multi-selects with a category, and collapse facets you don't want to look at. When you select an item, just a few parts of the page are redrawn. One 
line on the page allows you to remove facets. You can view the results data in 
several different ways. When you hover over a facet you can scroll through it (a problem with the "more" link in many implementations is that it makes it harder to understand the whole data set and harder to enforce visual comparisons between facets). You access the facet nav interface when you browse OR search.

Not sure whether this applies in your situation, but here is my journey... I have been looking at database records from pubmed.gov using an application where the home screen is made up entirely of facets corresponding to author, journal title, publication year, descriptor terms, grant agency, record status - almost everything that can be aggregated. The user can drill down in any direction. Seems to match "Overview First, Zoom and Filter, Details on Demand," which I've heard from information visualization research. In my case, when the user gets down to the record details, there's a link out to just those records at pubmed.gov (has a variety of advantages such as access to full text when available). I would also like an easy way to move what's generated for the facets into visualization tools such
 as bar charts, tree maps, Wordle, Google motion charts... Not there yet. 

If you're selling products perhaps you're done at that point. 

Faceted navigation seems very well suited for the first step of Chun Wei Choo's description of "the knowing organization." Moving on to decision support as Choo describes it, is the challenge in front of me, and would include adding a social tagging capability, where users could build their own new facets; in my case "Good for [audience type (nurses, patients, health care administrators, economists, policy makers)]" more clarity on the research methodology used and its level of success, intervention location (within a hospital? in a rural town?, in an urban neighborhood?), etc. And then we would need screens that are not facet-oriented, but workflow oriented. How are people going to use this new information in their work? I would want to move away from a complete reliance on facets. "Scaffolding" is a term I have heard from education - a learning framework, and 'group cognition' (term is from Gerry Stahl).

Siderean did a white paper 5+ years ago for their Seamark Navigator product where they gave what I thought was a good street-level description of "data-centric navigation" for sense-making. I'm not finding it in a quick Google search.

Dan Wendling




________________________________
 From: Tom Donehower <tdonehower at gmail.com>
To: ia-55 <ia-55 at meetup.com>; sigia l <Sigia-l at asis.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 8, 2013 1:19 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] Great Examples of Faceted Navigation/Search
 

Hi,

Looking for great examples of faceted nav/search. Looking for examples that
allow the user to select multiple categories and sub-categories and filter
or narrow their results.

-- 
-Tom
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2013  IA Summit
April 4 - 7, 2013
Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, MD
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