« Analyses of the "Space of Flows" | Main | Marco Susan's talk at Doors »
December 12, 2002
Faceted Classification, almost right
So the site I worked on in Berlin is live: the Netpack-Europe Packaging Store. It's a product database for the Semiconductor Packaging industry in Europe (packaging is the unsexy interior parts of your computer, plus some manufacturing equipment and services).
Now, that link takes you to search results for "laser", which is interesting in a couple ways: there are actually several types of products in the database with "laser" in their name, so the system suggests the categories that include that word. You can see this in the "Did you mean: ___" links at the top of the page.
The next part is a straight search results listing, broken down by main category. You can see down the page that two types of Stencil came up in the search.
Also, on the left nav, notice that your search results have been organized by facet. There are four here: Chip Packages, Materials, Processes, and Services.
Unfortunately, there are some incredibly serious problems that apparently didn't get solved that basically break this interface: one, somehow required data fields haven't been made required, which allows objects in the database to appear with parameters like "Select one...". Two, objects have been put in the database with no main category, which means that search results are presented in a category with no name. (Although in our faceted classification system, no facet is more "important" than others, we had to make one the "primary" category in order to make data input smoother--think of how entries in MoveableType have "main categories" and "secondary categories." Same thing.)
It's also obvious to me now that lots of content has been entered that the "Processes" facet was poorly thought out. Most products apply to many many processes, which means that for any long list of results (search for "bonder" to see what I mean), there are way too many Processes listed in the Process facet to be navigable. I'll admit that we had nowhere near enough content to be able to adequately forsee this; the Process facet worked for what we were given.
The faceted navigation on the left does work. If you click on "BGA" in the Chip Packages facet, you'll get the list of the two products that both have "laser" in their names AND are in the Chip Packages facet.
I'm also glad that the "Your last 5 searches" quick links function at the bottom left works.
Unfortunately, if you go to the Packaging Store homepage, the list of navigation options there doesn't show how many results are in each category. Lots of them would be zero, so most of those links give you no results; very frustrating.
Now that Netpack's public, though, I can point you to a case study of my work on this project. (To anyone involved, don't worry, there's nothing there that any other Information Architect couldn't deduce from using Netpack. No trade secrets are given away.)
Posted by Andrew at December 12, 2002 12:58 AM