I’ve been involved in various faceted search projects on classified sites, and have since begun really thinking about employing my learning on the mobile platform. Obviously the solution needs to be quite different, but I think some of the considerations are the same. Are you aware of any articles on this?

One thing I think tends to get overlooked with faceted search is designing for many *and* few results. Most articles I’ve seen on faceted search really focus on narrowing search results. However, we should bare in mind that faceted search also allows users to broaden their results as needed. This is really important if a single facet dramatically changes the range of content available in combination with another facet. Faceted item counts are really important as well as designing suggestions for no results, or very few.

In summary, I think more thought in this area needs to go towards designing for few results. Especially as there are more entry points with navigational elements such as tagging that can bring a user to search result formats.

Regards,
@mississa

Your design dos and don’ts definitely resonated with us and definitely agreed that you need to build your taxonomy with faceted search in mind. One key learning that we’ve gained from the project on drive.com.au is that choosing the right interface for the search starting point is also very important in helping users discover the ‘right’ content.

To help people find their dream car, we initially implemented a single keyword search interface (like Google) together with faceted navigation as our new search model on drive.com.au. We thought that the single keyword search interface would allow flexibility (eg. search for types such as ‘Sedan’, or by makes and models). A single keyword box was also considered by the team to be intuitive and familiar – given that it’s synonymous with Google’s search.

At the time of the project, there were much debate amongst the business owners whether this was a right decision. One group felt that this new ‘Google’ style interface model was too different from the other search interfaces in the automotive category in Australia. They felt for the car category – giving users a more ‘structured’ starting point such as drop downs of makes and models would be better.

We decided that the best way to solve the debate was by testing with users in real contexts and in real time. So we conducted a multivariate test of these two interfaces in our live environment.

To our surprise, the Google style interface produced the least business value (as measured by the number of pages consumed and number of leads generated to the advertiser) and that the hybrid version of keyword search box as well as drop downs of makes and models produced the best overall net revenue result.

We also conducted one-on-one usability testing to see what was going on here. We observed that the hybrid version is successful because it catered for users’ various levels of car knowledge and familiarity with a faceted search model.

I presented this as a case study at one of our industry conferences last year where I talked about user’s readiness for faceted search. My slides from this conference are available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/epek/are-users-really-ready-for-faceted-search-presentation

Just thought I’d share this experience with you and your readers.

Cheers,
Elizabeth Pek
Head of User Experience
Fairfax Digital
Sydney, Australia