Designing Facets for Navigation
I just got round to reading Stephanie Lemieux’s article on “Designing for Faceted Search” (I had the pleasure of hearing Stephanie speak at Taxonomy Bootcamp last month, though she evidently didn’t enjoy hearing me). It’s geared towards external websites and the examples are geared towards classifying tangibles (eg products), and I’d love to see something more advanced on facet design for the messier, more ambiguous world of knowledge and information assets inside organisations. However, Stephanie’s piece lifts out a few very useful principles, which I paraphrase below:
- Design and prioritise your facets based on use cases (understand how the user approaches the content)
- Facet display is not the same as facet design – you can simplify the navigation/browsing task by using progressive disclosure of facets, or context-sensitive display of facets (ie show the facets only when and where your users need to see them, which is another reason you need to understand your users’ work-world)
- Pragmatism trumps purity – if your scientific principles are going to be compromised by a specific user need, don’t lose sleep over it; the objective is not to be 100% tidy, it’s to be effective.
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