Netpack Project Summary

Overview and Approach

Challenge: design a product information website for several thousand technology products, with a user interface that simplified the complexity of the product domain.

Summary

I designed an organizational system and user interface for finding and classifying a large group of complex and unpredictable technology products, and took advantage of current approaches to information architecture.

Client

Netpack-Europe.org is the official organization for Semiconductor Packaging manufacturers in the European Union. Berlin-based design agency defcom webdressing was hired to design and build a web-based catalog of products for the Packaging Store section of the site.

Process

I began by spending a lot of time with our subject matter experts and primary audience: research scientists in the field of semiconductor manufacturing. These users will use the system to learn about available products and to spec out new products.

I developed a domain taxonomy—a controlled vocabulary of official terms and their variants (such as misspellings and acronyms) that would eventually be used to support searching and browsing. While building the product taxonomy, we were mindful that the Netpack-Europe site will eventually scale to include job listings, industry news, and other content types. Therefore, we designed the taxonomy—and the UI to maintain it—to be as flexible and scalable as possible.

Early on, we realized that a simple hierarchy would not work well to classify the complex set of products that would eventually be in our database. We decided to use a faceted classification system, in which any product appears in multiple mutually exclusive categories. Although this might sound less clear than a simple hierarchical system (like the files and folders on your computer), in fact it offers a lot more flexibility when searching and browsing.

Solution

The faceted classification system allowed us to build a site navigation system that allows users to start browsing by any of several attributes, such as Process or Interconnection Technology, and build lists of search results easily without needing to comb through a monolithic hierarchy of products.

We were careful to create paper prototypes (wireframes) of CMS screens and search and browse interfaces before building complex HTML versions.

Our search interface takes advantage of the taxonomy as well. Searches in the Netpack Packaging Store can recognize misspellings and common acronyms (“BGA” or “Ball Gird Array” for “Ball Grid Array”), insuring that users get useful search results more often. Search is fully integrated with the navigation categories; search results are grouped by facet category so that users can zero in on a desired product or product type quickly. We also added a set of quick links to the user’s last five sets of search results. This is a surprisingly simple addition to a search/browse interface that makes it easy for users to back up to an earlier search request.

Content providers—the product manufacturers—use an interface which reduces to three screens the entire process of entering information about a product and categorizing it using our taxonomy.

Project Status

Netpack's Packaging Store is envisioned as a central product database for a large industry. It therefore requires the cooperation of many European Semiconductor manufacturers to succeed. It will take time to demonstrate to these companies the value of participating in a shared database; as of October 2002, manufacturers have submitted little content to Netpack. Regardless of the ease-of-use or the flexibility of the system, users are asked to overcome an understandable reluctance to share their product information in a system they do not directly control.