The power of multifaceted navigation.
We notice many organizations are looking for solutions in order to solve information overload. Most choose for the classical approach , i.e. a Google-like simple search box. But they then discover that their users have problems with specifying search criteria (e.g. over- and underspecification). Hence the growing interest in “multifaceted navigation” (aka ‘faceted browsing’, ‘guided navigation’, ‘faceted search’, ‘multifaceted search’…).
The concept first made its appearance in e-Commerce: on-line retailers noticed that shoppers often left their site after using their ‘advanced search’ – tool. In these advanced search tools, visitors must enter their entire criteria up front (e.g. MP3-player with the following criteria: 1GB of storage, flash memory type and costing less than 100€) which often leads to a ‘0 Results’ message and forces the visitor to make several time consuming iterative searches.
That is why multifaceted navigation is so powerful for end-users: it has the ability to show all the characteristics of the item and it allows them to choose those the features important to them. An MP3-player has the possible characteristics (‘facets’) such as brand, price, memory type, storage space, weight, etc. As soon as they select a facet value (‘e.g. weight between ’30 – 50g’) , the list of items matching their criterion remains in the search result and the facets are updated to show only valid choices of what’s left.
So multifaceted navigation was quickly and easily adopted within the e-Commerce space but now it is starting to make its way into other environments like intranets, websites, document management platforms, self-service support sites, knowledge management systems and even on top of databases (e.g. jobsites, ecatalogues,..)
Imagine a German speaking technical service person that needs to make a repair on a water pump of brand X and model year 2001 which is installed indoors in an explosive environment. By selecting the obvious facet values ‘German’, ‘Pumps’, ‘2001’ and ‘Brand X’ he will immediately see how many and what kind of documents are available after every click. He can drill down further (‘water pump’, ‘service manual’, ‘indoors’). Imagine doing the same query with a classical search interface: this would need several iterations and no guarantee the person will be able to find the information he needs by himself.
Multifaceted navigation has been around for some years but the functionality was only made available by some specialized software vendors who charged a lot for them. But today, a leading enterprise search vendor like FAST offers multifaceted navigation within its search platform and with its Seamark Navigator, a company like Siderean has a very powerful and affordable solution in its portfolio. If you are more interested in open source solutions, Apache Lucene can be used for developing a multifaceted navigation solution
Want to learn more about multifaceted navigation?
- Attend our Free Enterprise Search Seminar on the 23rd of February
- Test drive the Seamark Navigator (registration required)
- Read the article by Jeffrey Veen on best practices for designing a multifaceted navigation system (Source:Adaptive Path)
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