I'd Rather Be Writing » Amazon

Faceted Classification, Faceted Search [Organizing Content 6]

Tom Johnson — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:13:16 +0000

In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover other topics through browsing, and to provide one perspective on the organization of the material, but topic-based navigation shouldn’t be the only means of navigating the content. Another way to allow users to find your content is through faceted classification and faceted search.

Faceted Classification

In a faceted classification system, you tag your content with a specific set of attributes. You then provide different arrangements and sorting of the content based on those attributes.

For example, if you have an online paint store, the set of attributes for your faceted classification system might include brand, color, texture, shine, thickness, and cost. You can then allow users to navigate the paint products by each of these attributes.

Sarah Maddox notes that in Matthew Ellison’s Turning Search into Find presentation at the AODC 10 conference, he gave an example of faceted classification with the shoe store sportsshoes.com.

Faceted classification system

Many times faceted classification systems allow you to combine and narrow down the attributes to get closer and closer to your information. Sarah notes that

Matthew introduced the concept of the “scent of information”: If people can see that they’re getting nearer to the information that they’re want, they’re quite happy to keep combining facets to narrow down their search.

Faceted classification and faceted search systems are actually quite common on the web. When you search for something on Google, the left pane provides a list of facets that you can use to limit the search results to a specific category of information.

Google's faceted search

In the above example, I searched for “undercover agents.” Using the facets, I can limit the results to show images, videos, news, discussions, shopping sites, maps, books, or other formats that contain the words “undercover agents.” This is the way Google has categorized the different types of information it indexes.

Amazon also provides a faceted search. When you search for a product, such as Beauty and the Beast, you see a list of facets in the sidebar to narrow the results.

Faceted browsing on Amazon

Grooveshark also provides a faceted search based on the term you search for.

Grooveshark's faceted search

Navigation Features

The most popular sites on the web may not all be set up with faceted classification and faceted search, but they do offer other types of navigational features. These other navigational features could informally be called facets, but according to Peter Morville, author of Search Patterns and Ambient Findability, these organization systems are more like features rather than facets. But they still organize and arrange the content into structures that aren’t based on hierarchical topic containers. Here are a few examples.

Hulu allows users to choose among the following:

Gallery content
Channels
Most Popular
Recently Added
Collections
Trailers
Spotlights
TV
Movies
Search

Wikipedia provides users with these navigational features:

Featured content
Current events
Random article
Today’s Featured Article
In the News
On this day
Today’s featured picture
Categories
Index

The New York Times provides these features for navigating the content:

Today’s Paper
Video
Most Popular
Times Topics (like an index)
Categories
Most E-mailed
Most Blogged
Most Viewed
Most Searched
What We’re Reading
Reader’s Recommendations
Most Recent

Coming back to Amazon, when you view a product on Amazon, you get a ton of interesting navigational features for finding more content:

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Tags Customers Associate with This Product
Customer Reviews
Customer Discussions
Look for Similar Items by Category
Your Recent History

You can see the wide variety of faceted classification, faceted search, and other navigation features on the web. Why don’t we borrow more of these faceted navigation models to provide alternative organization systems for our help content? Why is it that, despite the abundance of these alternative navigation systems, most technical writers still stick with a traditional topic-based, hierarchical folders? In contrast to many sites on the web, the organizational structure of most online help files hasn’t changed in 20 years.

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Systems that Get Better the More People Use Them

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:17:45 +0000

In Publishing 2.0, Tim O’Reilly says Web 2.0 is “any network effect that makes a system better the more people use it.” Web 2.0 isn’t just user-generated content; it’s harnessing the collective intelligence of your users to make your system better.

O’Reilly’s definition is intriguing because it’s the opposite of the natural law of use. Your car doesn’t get better the more you use it. A music track doesn’t get better if more people listen to it. Your bank account doesn’t improve as more people use it. Your feet don’t get better the more you use them. Very few things actually get better the more you use them. Not Web 2.0. It’s almost paradoxical. The more people who use it, the better it gets.

O’Reilly gives two main examples:

Google. With Google, every time a user makes a link to another site, Google uses that hyperlink to better inform its search algorithm.
Amazon. Borders and Barnes & Noble have the same stock of books, but Amazon integrates user reviews and commentary to add more value to their literary collection. With each review, the site gets more valuable.

O’Reilly also mentioned eBay and Craigslist. With each system, the more people use it, the better it gets. O’Reilly also has interesting research on publishing and digital libraries, but I’ll save that for another post.

The question for technical writers is not how you can enable user-generated content with your help, but how you can make your documentation better as more people use it.

I wish I could say I have lots of cool ideas on how to do this. I don’t, maybe you do — refine search results based on user queries, allow users to comment on topics, sort topics based on popularity of views, enable users to contribute their own topics, configure search results based on topic viewing time, provide user community, yada yada yada.

These ideas aren’t new or particularly interesting. Partly it’s because they’re still so pie in the sky, how- -do-you-even-do-it type features. Next I’ll suggest telepathically downloading hotspots in user-brains to note the kinesthetic, verbal, or auditory preferences of your users based on the lobes that light up.

Yet we’re at a point technically where many of these features exist or are available. Our problem is that most help authors aren’t programmers, and few programmers get jazzed about coding help tools. When’s the last time you saw an open source help authoring tool that was specifically designed to create help systems?

(Okay, I did see one last week — called PHP Manual Creator, but it looked really primitive.)

In contrast, look at the explosion of social networks, blog platforms, video sharing tools, and countless other killer web 2.0 apps. Inevitably, help systems will also migrate more towards O’Reilly’s idea of Web 2.0. But rather than seeing these blow-your-mind-web-2.0-type tools emerge from the help developer community (i.e., all those companies who advertise in Intercom), I think the next-generation tools will come from web developers and designers who create them for another purpose. We’ll simply repurpose them to deliver help content.

The Impact of Social Media on Technical Communication — Podcast Interview with Bill Albing

Tom Johnson — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:02:54 +0000

Download MP3
Duration: 27 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds.

Bill explains that the web is more than just a venue for publication — it’s a medium that allows people to interconnect and work/collaborate with information. This is the direction we’re moving towards, and technical communicators are starting to integrate social media, such as user forums, directly into their help.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

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