I was thinking of a more static architecture. A high level grouping with general links bringing the user in to Summary pages, I guess these pages could have Importance or Recent listing (NOT menu items) and for anything that wasnt in immediate sight you provide search & browsing.. but definitely do not try to provide a menu tree right down to individual pages if your site is large.

I like the structure of http://www.dmxzone.com/ with General grouping across the top, some verbs in the top left. Search functionality in both places. A main summary on important announcements and another Grouping/Recent Items list on the RHS. Its a little overkill but extremely efficient > ‘fast’.

Links can appear in multiple listings.

Such quick links sections and a search facility *might* be a good solution.

1)Unless you have an extremely large and ill-designed menu system, any one user’s inability to find a particular item an an alphabetical list would be compensated for statistically across all user interactions.
2)A review of search items, if such functionality exists on your interface, would highlight items users were looking for that existed in the menu tree. Thus flagging an issue with that item’s placement.

However… I’m begining to question the usefulness of developing and implementing some form of Importance list, no matter what way it was arrived at.

The reason you would create one is to reduce the user’s time spent looking down long lists searching for best matches. Alphabetical lists work when the user knows what they are looking for, no matter the size of the list. If they are searching for best matches then why ask the user to do the hardwork when you can do it for them. Search functionality better addresses their goal than putting what you think might be what they’re looking for at the top of the list/tree. To my mind that’s a type of recommendation system without any understanding of the user’s specific goal or needs.

Amazon combines Alphabetical, Importance and Search paths to products. Of the three I find the Importance list “See all 32 categories” the most time consuming interaction. For direct product look-ups, where I knew exactly which item I wanted, the Search was the quickest. For browsing I found a combination of Alphabetical list drilling followed by Search as part of a single product look-up to be the most efficient.

After some thought I feel this negates the need for anything other than an Alphabetical menu. That is, in future if I build something where I find users hunting around a menu tree I’ll emphasize the search functionality.

Here’s a question for the UIE team. At what level of interface complexity (groups & items or breath and depth of menu tree) do you feel alphabetical listing becomes random search for users who do not know exactly what they are looking for?

While that remark is not necessarily true, the perception is. Enough displays change on a frequent basis to make shopping more frustrating than rewarding. Here, there are few, if any, choices and shoppers are locked in. Traveling 35 to 65 miles for basic household items makes the cost of change too high. On any website (at least, any website that is not 100% unique), the user’s cost to change is negligible, navigation must be consistent, and users need advanced notice for any major changes.

Are the analytics showing a link is unpopular because nobody wants it or because nobody can find it (or understand it)?

If the case is the latter, then you may just reinforce the problem by making the stuff that’s already easily findable more easy and the stuff that isn’t more difficult.

No, not that kind of sorting. We’re talking about how to sort lists of links (or any objects, really) such that users can find what they’re looking for faster, better, harder, stronger. Jared over at UIE has a great article on how to arran…

Changing it up every month (or any time period really) is going to drive your returning visitors up the wall.

Now this may create a whole series of new problems potentially. But its the equivalent of moving old stock to the back of the store and moving the stock that is moving well up front.

I would revise the names of some of the items, e.g. Fishing and Sports related . Even though you may have more fishing related items than the rest of sporting items combined, fishing is part of the sport group. Sports and Fishing would be a slightly better name.

I would try grouping items such as Wrought Iron & Cast Iron together, find a general name then start grouping the general names together to build a hierarchy.

For fun, you could build a yes/no search engine based on 20 questions (o;

• Advertising & Displays
• African Art
• American Art Pottery
• Americana
• Architectural & Garden
• Art & Paintings
• Art Glass
• Baskets & Woodenware
• Black Americana
• Books & Manuscripts
• Bottles
• Brass-Copper-Bronze
• Breweriana
• Buttons & Smalls
• Cameras
• Cast Iron
• Ceramics
• Children’s Items
• Civil War
• Clocks & Watches
• Coin Op & Mechanical
• Coins
• Comic
• Costume Jewelry
• Country
• Deco & Decorative Arts
• Decoys
• Dolls & Accessories
• Eclectic
• Ephemera
• Fiesta & Depression
• Fishing & Sports Related
• Flow Blue & Majolica
• Folk Art
• Forged Iron
• Furniture
• Furniture Country
• Furniture English/Euro
• Furniture Oak
• Furniture Painted
• Furniture Period
• Furniture Victorian
• Games, Toys & Trains
• General Line
• Glass, China & Crystal
• Guns, Armour & Arms
• Hats & Hat Pins
• Jewelry & Gemstones
• Kitchen Related
• Lamps & Lighting
• Lithographs & Engravings
• Maps
• Marbles
• Marine & Nautical
• Maxfield Parrish
• Medical
• Memorabilia
• Metalware
• Military
• Miscellaneous & Other
• Musical
• Native American
• Optical
• Oriental / Orientalia
• Paper
• Pewter
• Photographica
• Postcards
• Pottery & Porcelain
• Primitives
• Prints & Posters
• Quilts
• Radios & Phonographs
• Rugs-Oriental & Indian
• Scientific Instruments
• Staffordshire
• Steiff & Teddy Bears
• Sterling & Silver Plate
• Stoneware & Yelloware
• Tools & Hardware
• Transportation
• Victorian
• Vintage Clothing
• Vintage Textiles & Linens
• Wallace Nutting
• Western Memorabilia
• Wicker
• Wrought Iron

I didn’t find many examples of alpabetical listings on sites like Target.com or Kmart.com, instead there’re usually two tiers of links in the left navigation : the functional groups then the subcategories, all ordered by criteria not so obvious to me.

Target
Home
Furniture
Baby
Kids
Women
Men
Electronics
Sports
Toys
Entertainment

Kmart
Apparel
Baby & Kids
Jewelry
Electronics
Toys
Health & beauty
For the Home
Sports

Take Target for example, under “Home” category we have:
Bedding
Kitchen + Housewares
Patio + Garden
Home Decor
Lighting
Rugs
Window Coverings
Slipcovers
Appliances
Bath
Dining
Home Improvement
Health + beauty
Pets
See All

For such long lists, wouldn’t it be nice if both tiers of links are listed alphabetically? I never succeeded in remembering the positions of these links because they’re all different across websites..

Using your example list above if the user was looking for a Necklace the eye first trains in on N > miss: no such item > Scans the list filtering out items not related to Necklace > user will either stop on jewelry or continue scaning and return > click and repeat steps if necessary

It would seem to me that this is most appropriate for interfaces where the user enters at the top level of the menu looking for an item buried within, with no knowledge of the path. Would it be a generalisation to say this is likely to need seperate search functionality as good practice? If so then this brings in to question the choice of a menu system which may require search processing on behalf of the user when there is search functionality on the system.

For example, how often do you drill down through the menu on amazon versus enter a search item. I just tried drilling for ‘toaster’ and gave up.

I’m making some sweeping generalistions. There are times when alphabetical nuggets are the only option, windows for one.

For example, it’s faster for users to scan this list:

Computers
Furniture
Gifts
Jewelry
Kitchen Appliances
Music
Pets
Phones

vs. this list …
Phones
Furniture
Music
Kitchen Appliances
Computers
Gifts
Pets
Jewelry

In general, I’ve discovered that users accomplish their goals faster if they readily understand how the “nuggets” are organized (either by price, by location, alphabetized, etc.). So, if “alphabetized nuggets” are not appropriate for your site, then use other methods for communicating the site’s structure quickly and effectively to users … because users will want to know.

Can this be done in your head, yes. As I’m not working with real users why go to the effort? Some very good reasons I wont bore you with. But I should have been more careful using a term that means something else to ui prefessionals – thanks for picking up on that.

Jared: I do collect frequency and importance in some card sorts – sometimes on the cards, more often as a part of a debrief discussion.

Donna: Pauric is right that you have a lot of room on the cards. When doing card sorts, we also gather frequency and importance information, as I described here. But, this is a variant that I don’t see discussed when people talk about how they do card sorts.

And for your intranet, what do you mean by you prioritise on frequency? Frequency of what? How frequent your users put two cards together? I hope not – this would be a particularly poor way of figuring out what should be at the top of a list. All it means is that people think those two items belong together, not that either of them belong at the top.

Jared – I think you could make some inferences about priority from a card sort. Cards that people quickly put together may be more likely to be important, closely related and belong towards the top of the list. You wouldn’t get this from the output of the sort, but from watching as people go through it. But this wouldn’t be a strong measure.

I do a traditional cardsort to make the high level grouping (setup, maintenance, device etc) and alphabetical list the sub items/nouns/features.

The second interface is more of an informational tool, intranet. Created the cards with frequency of use label/tag taken from stats and cross checked with user requirements and tasks (yes, room for error). Traditional Car sort group them and then prioritise the sub group list on frequency. Or any other criterea of your choice.

My point is, there’s a lot more room on that card for tags other than the feature.

But, I do get the feeling I may be missing some part of a bigger picture. I only work on a handful of ui’s but I struggle to see why this approach would fail with something like the the SIGIA-L list, they seem to have not spent enough time thinking about nomenclature and purpose of each category, and just dove in to content.

Ryan: Why do you think that alphabetized nuggets are the way to go?

Card sorting!

or have I missed something here?