Improving faceted search

In a previous life, I redesigned the product finding experience for sun.com, which was pretty much just a good implementation of faceted search. I’d love to be able to show you what that looked like, but unfortunately, these days, the Sun product line is mostly an html spreadsheet in a modal overlay on the Oracle acquisitions web site.

I did write about it at the time, with reference to the importance of sorting out the data architecture if you have any hope of manipulating that data in a way that enables a simple, usable interface.

Scroll forward a few years, and I’m directed to another implementation of faceted search on the patientslikeme web site (via Jan Srutek, via Jared Spool), which takes an inordinate amount of data, provides some interesting methods for interrogating that data and, in my case, rather quickly diminishes your will to live when you actually find some’ patients like me’.

Of course, I say ‘patients like me’, but what I’m really looking at when I see a list of 44-year-old, white, not Hispanic or Latin males, who are not yet dead, is just a view of the data that I’ve filtered to be as ‘like me’ as the faceted search allows me to make it, based on the patients who have registered and who are willing to let anybody know everything about them. What interests me more about this are the filters I have available, and the interface I’m using to generate that view and whether that view is useful , meaningful or even interesting.

To be honest, I don’t find that it’s any of those things, but it does highlight that there seems to be very little movement in the design of faceted search. Between my own experiences of designing for this experience, and coming across it every day on retail, travel, ecommerce and any number of other sites, there appear to be limited ways in which you can move the same objects around the interface (sliders, checkboxes, drop-downs, free text inputs) and a similarly limited number of ways in which you can display multiple results and allow the user to retain control, without resorting to chevron blindness or the curse of the ‘remove’.

It is true that you can use appropriate technology to improve the interaction, so that instant feedback to user inputs make the whole ‘fiddling about’ experience more obvious and enjoyable. On patientslikeme, there’s a familiar ‘click and wait’ model, which lets you know something is happening, even if it’s not always obvious what it is. As ‘finding’ things increasingly involves a cross-channel experience, there are even more opportunities/challenges for improving faceted search, maybe with a radically different models, supported by different interfaces and user interactions. But maybe it’s never really improved over the last few years because, really, it doesn’t have to. If it does what it does, and you’re pretty familiar with it, it probably doesn’t need changing for the sake of it, but I’d love to see good examples of where doing it differently does actually mean doing it better. From a user’s point of view, of course.

30/12/11 Joe said:

Hey Tim, I found this blog to be very interesting. I agree that although faceted search is working alright for now, and it's getting customers to where they need to be, but I do believe the better the faceted search operates the more likely a customer will convert into a sale. I'm new to the whole faceted search environment and have been learning more and more about the "right" way to do things. I was curious if you know of any events, conferences, seminars, webinars or even just courses that focus on the best practices in taxonomy and design in which I could attend to get better at understanding the right way to do things. Thanks, Joe

03/01/12 Tim Caynes said:

Hi Joe, I think that even since I wrote this I've seen a few improvements driven by the advances in HTML5, CSS, JQuery, etc. that enable you to be much more dynamic about delivering results and filtering output. In addition, the more I develop for mobile first, the clearer my focus is on simplifying the experience - researching and understanding the small set of core attributes that really matter, rather than wondering about how to accommodate multiple attributes in an increasingly cluttered interface. If you're looking for inspiration for best practice in information architecture, you could start with IA for the World Wide Web (book) by Rosenfeld and Morville, if you haven't already, but there are number of events and webinars out there. There's a content strategy meet up in London in January (via meetup.com), various webinars and recordings on the UIE site (uie.com), and a host of other stuff out there. Probably a good idea to search on Lanyrd for Information Archicture (lanyrd.com) for related events. In the end, there's no 'right' way, of course, but understanding the current best practice is definitely a good place to start.