Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
NP ;-) . Just to explain: With tooltips I meant js-tooltips (not the native webbrowser tooltips) since sliders require JS anyway, presenting additional info in a Js-tooltip on drag, doesn't limit the nr of people able to view it. I think this is ok from a usability standpoint since I don't consider the 'nr of items left' info 100% essential (after all lots of sites do well without it at the moment). Call if graceful degradation ;-) As for mobile, I never realized that 'hover' is an issue on mobile, but on drag is supported on mobile touch displays... Moreover, having a navigational-complex site like kayak.com / tripadvisor.com to work well on mobile (from a usability perspective) is pretty much an utopia anyway. For these types of sites, specialized mobile sites (or apps as is the case for the above brands) are the way to go in my opinion. Geert-Jan 2010/5/28 Mark Bennett mbenn...@ideaeng.com Haha! Important tooltips are now deprecated in Web Applications. This is nothing official, of course. But it's being advised to avoid important UI tasks that require cursor tracking, mouse-over, hovering, etc. in web applications. Why? Many touch-centric mobile devices don't support hover. For me I'm used to my laptop where the touch pad or stylus *is* able to measure the pressure. But the finger based touch devices generally can differenciate it I guess. They *can* tell one gesture from another, but only looking at the timing and shape. And hapless hover aint one of them. With that said, I'm still a fan of Tool Tips in desktop IDE's like Eclipse, or even on Web applications when I'm on a desktop. I guess the point is that, if it's a really important thing, then you need to expose it in another way on mobile. Just passing this on, please don't shoot the messenger. ;-) Mark -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513 On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Geert-Jan Brits gbr...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the user actually drags the slider. If the user doesn't drag (or hovers over ) the slider 'nr of items left' isn't shown. Moreover, initially a slider doesn't limit the results so 'nr of items left' shown for the slider would be the same as the overall number of items left (thereby being redundant) I must say I haven't seen this been implemented but it would be rather easy to adapt a slider implementation, to show the nr on drag/ hover. (they exit for jquery, scriptaculous and a bunch of other libs) Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org On 27.05.2010, at 23:32, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) yeah i have been pondering something similar. but i now realized that this way the user doesnt get an overview of the distribution without actually applying the filter. that being said, it would be nice to display 3 numbers with the silders, the count of items that were filtered out on the lower and upper boundaries as well as the number of items still left (*). aside from this i just put a little tweak to my facetting online: http://search.un-informed.org/search?q=malariatm=anys=Search if you deselect any of the checkboxes, it updates the counts. however i display both the count without and with those additional checkbox filters applied (actually i only display two numbers of they are not the same): http://screencast.com/t/MWUzYWZkY2Yt regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org (*) if anyone has a slider that can do the above i would love to integrate that and replace the adoption year checkboxes with that
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 5/28/2010 9:31 PM, Chris Hostetter wrote: : Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the : user actually drags the slider. Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the numeric spectrum. it wsa a little more complicated then anything we needed -- and seemed like a real pain in hte ass to implement. i still don't know of anyone doing anything like that, but it's definitley an interesting idea. The hard part is really just deciding what quantum interval you want to use along the xaxis to decide how to count the docs for the y axis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR -Hoss I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have time, I might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all the data since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by storing the facet counts for each interval in javascript.
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Interesting.. say you have a double slider with a discrete range (like tripadvisor et.al.) perhaps it would be a good guideline to use these discrete points for the quantum interval for the sparkline as well? Of course it then becomes the question which discrete values to use for the slider. I tend to follow what tripadvisor does for it's price-slider: set a cap for the max price, and set a fixed interval ($25) for the discrete steps. (of course there are edge cases like when no product hits the maximum capped price) I have also seen non-linear steps implemented, but I guess this doesn't go well with the notion of sparlines. Anyway, from a implementation standpoint it would be enough for Solr to return the 'nr of items' per interval. From that, it would be easy to calculate on the application-side the 'nr of items' for each possible slider-combination. getting these values from solr would require (staying with the price-example): - a new discretised price field. And doing a facet.field. - the (continu) price field already present, and doing 50 facet queries (if you have 50 steps) - another more elegant way ;-) . Perhaps an addition to statscomponent that returns all counts within a discrete (to be specified) step? Would this slow the statscomponent-code down a lot, or ir the info already (almost) present in statscomponent for doing things as calculating sddev / means, etc? - something I'm completely missing... 2010/5/28 Chris Hostetter hossman_luc...@fucit.org : Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the : user actually drags the slider. Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the numeric spectrum. it wsa a little more complicated then anything we needed -- and seemed like a real pain in hte ass to implement. i still don't know of anyone doing anything like that, but it's definitley an interesting idea. The hard part is really just deciding what quantum interval you want to use along the xaxis to decide how to count the docs for the y axis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
May I ask how you implemented getting the facet counts for each interval? Do you use a facet-query per interval? And perhaps for inspiration a link to the site you implemented this .. Thanks, Geert-Jan I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have time, I might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all the data since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by storing the facet counts for each interval in javascript.
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 31.05.2010, at 11:29, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: May I ask how you implemented getting the facet counts for each interval? Do you use a facet-query per interval? And perhaps for inspiration a link to the site you implemented this .. Thanks, Geert-Jan I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have time, I might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all the data since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by storing the facet counts for each interval in javascript. i guess the easiest is to do the intervals at index time, obviously less flexible. regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 5/31/2010 11:29 AM, Geert-Jan Brits wrote:
May I ask how you implemented getting the facet counts for each interval? Do
you use a facet-query per interval?
And perhaps for inspiration a link to the site you implemented this ..
Thanks,
Geert-Jan
I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have time, I
might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all the data
since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by storing the
facet counts for each interval in javascript.
Hi,
Sorry, seems I pressed send halfway through my mail and forgot about it.
The site I implemented my numerical range faceting on is
http://www.mysecondhome.co.uk/search.html and I got the facets by making
a small patch for Solr (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1240)
which does the same thing for numbers what date faceting does for dates.
The biggest issue with range-faceting is the double counting of edges
(which also happens in date faceting, see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-397). My patch deals with
that by adding an extra parameter which allows you specify which end of
the range query should be exclusive.
A secondary issue is that you can't do filter queries with one end
inclusive and one end exclusive (i.e. price:[500 TO 1000}). You can get
around this by doing price:({500 TO 1000} OR 500). I've looked into
the JavaCC code of Lucene to see if I could fix it so you could mix []
and {} but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with it to get it to work.
Regards,
gwk
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 5/31/2010 11:50 AM, gwk wrote:
On 5/31/2010 11:29 AM, Geert-Jan Brits wrote:
May I ask how you implemented getting the facet counts for each
interval? Do
you use a facet-query per interval?
And perhaps for inspiration a link to the site you implemented this ..
Thanks,
Geert-Jan
I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have
time, I
might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all
the data
since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by
storing the
facet counts for each interval in javascript.
Hi,
Sorry, seems I pressed send halfway through my mail and forgot about
it. The site I implemented my numerical range faceting on is
http://www.mysecondhome.co.uk/search.html and I got the facets by
making a small patch for Solr
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1240) which does the same
thing for numbers what date faceting does for dates.
The biggest issue with range-faceting is the double counting of edges
(which also happens in date faceting, see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-397). My patch deals with
that by adding an extra parameter which allows you specify which end
of the range query should be exclusive.
A secondary issue is that you can't do filter queries with one end
inclusive and one end exclusive (i.e. price:[500 TO 1000}). You can
get around this by doing price:({500 TO 1000} OR 500). I've looked
into the JavaCC code of Lucene to see if I could fix it so you could
mix [] and {} but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with it to get
it to work.
Regards,
gwk
Hi,
I was supposed to work on something else but I just couldn't resist, and
just implemented some bar-graphs for the range sliders and I really like
it. In my case it was really easy, all the data was already right there
in javascript so it's not causing additional server side load. It's also
really nice to see the graph updating when a facet is selected/changed.
Regards,
gwk
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 5/31/2010 4:24 PM, gwk wrote:
On 5/31/2010 11:50 AM, gwk wrote:
On 5/31/2010 11:29 AM, Geert-Jan Brits wrote:
May I ask how you implemented getting the facet counts for each
interval? Do
you use a facet-query per interval?
And perhaps for inspiration a link to the site you implemented this ..
Thanks,
Geert-Jan
I love the idea of a sparkline at range-sliders. I think if I have
time, I
might add them to the range sliders on our site. I already have all
the data
since I show the count for a range while the user is dragging by
storing the
facet counts for each interval in javascript.
Hi,
Sorry, seems I pressed send halfway through my mail and forgot about
it. The site I implemented my numerical range faceting on is
http://www.mysecondhome.co.uk/search.html and I got the facets by
making a small patch for Solr
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1240) which does the same
thing for numbers what date faceting does for dates.
The biggest issue with range-faceting is the double counting of edges
(which also happens in date faceting, see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-397). My patch deals with
that by adding an extra parameter which allows you specify which end
of the range query should be exclusive.
A secondary issue is that you can't do filter queries with one end
inclusive and one end exclusive (i.e. price:[500 TO 1000}). You can
get around this by doing price:({500 TO 1000} OR 500). I've looked
into the JavaCC code of Lucene to see if I could fix it so you could
mix [] and {} but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with it to
get it to work.
Regards,
gwk
Hi,
I was supposed to work on something else but I just couldn't resist,
and just implemented some bar-graphs for the range sliders and I
really like it. In my case it was really easy, all the data was
already right there in javascript so it's not causing additional
server side load. It's also really nice to see the graph updating when
a facet is selected/changed.
Regards,
gwk
(Tried attaching an image, but it didn't work, so here it is:
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/7766/faceting.png)
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
I'm interested in this stuff, but what is a 'sparkline', and can I get a URL of an example? Dennis Gearon Signature Warning EARTH has a Right To Life, otherwise we all die. Read 'Hot, Flat, and Crowded' Laugh at http://www.yert.com/film.php --- On Fri, 5/28/10, Chris Hostetter hossman_luc...@fucit.org wrote: From: Chris Hostetter hossman_luc...@fucit.org Subject: Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Date: Friday, May 28, 2010, 3:34 PM : you mean something like the following? : http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/?query=jazzback=defaultNavigation=; : Also http://markmail.org has some nice chart Yeah ... those are close to what i mean -- but in both cases there is really one big visual graph of a single numeric value (ironicly it's a timeline in both cases) ... i was thinking more along the lines of when a facet UI has *multiple* numeric facets. Imagine if a site like kayak.com for example, that has a search UI with 7 numeric sliders (departure take off time, departure landing time, return take off time, return landing time, layover duration, trip duration, and price) showed you a small sparkline above each slider that showed you where the various options tended to cluster based on the other filters you had applied -- so you can see that most flights have layovers in the ~30 minute range, and the key price point is around $99 ... but when you move the take off time slider to early in the morning the sparkline above layover duration shifts up to longer layovers, and the prices start tnreding up. -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:57 -0700 (PDT) Dennis Gearon gear...@sbcglobal.net wrote: I'm interested in this stuff, but what is a 'sparkline', and can I get a URL of an example? [...] Here is one that I recently came across, and liked (look at the last example): http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/elastic-lists/ The code has apparently also been recently open-sourced. Regards, Gora
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: I'm interested in this stuff, but what is a 'sparkline', and can I get a URL of an example? The email in this thread where i first suggested that sparklines on numeric facets would be cool had two links, one to the definitive Sparklines essay by Tufte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: Here is one that I recently came across, and liked (look at the : last example): http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/elastic-lists/ : The code has apparently also been recently open-sourced. Ah... that is a pretty awesome visual UI for facets -- and they do use sparklines but not in the way i was suggesting. If you show sparklines in that UI, then each facet *constraint* includes a sparkline showing it's distribution over time ... so in the nobel price demo, if you turn sparklines on and look at the prize facet, each type of prize has a sparkline showing how many were given out over the years (so it's easy to see that economics prizes were added relatively late) but there isn't a sparkline showing the statistical distribution of values across numeric fields -- the only numeric field is year (well, they also have decade but that's the same thing) and by having hte sparkline on the constraints instead of on the facet itself, you can't tell at quick glance wether the number of total prizes given out is trending up or down. The sparklines also aren't updated as constraincts from other facets are applied -- if i click on the female constraint in the gender facet, i would like to see the sparklines on all of the other facets updated to provide a visual cue of how the results have changed for that facet/constraint (instead, this ui shrinks the bounding boxes arround each constraint in a collaping model -- which makes perfect sense given that the entire point of hte UI is elastic lists ... but it doesn't convey distribution information) -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: see that economics prizes were added relatively late) but there isn't a : sparkline showing the statistical distribution of values across numeric : fields -- the only numeric field is year (well, they also have decade but : that's the same thing) and by having hte sparkline on the constraints : instead of on the facet itself, you can't tell at quick glance wether the : number of total prizes given out is trending up or down. FWIW: I found an article that really hits the nail on the head with what i was trying to suggest about using sparklines on numeric sliders... http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/02/numeric-filters-issues-and-best-practices.php -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Here's a slider example that narrows down how many tags/facets are displayed: http://www.nines.org/tags How about a tree map? See my slides from the prototyping preso at EuroCon last week: http://lucene-eurocon.org/sessions-track2-day2.html#4 Pie in the sky, how about pie charts? I like 'em :) From Koji's blog (but his demo site is currently down): http://lucene.jugem.jp/?eid=150 Perhaps only tangentially related, but one thing I really prefer in a rich search UI is the ability to invert constraints. Show me everything about flare, now narrow to the science category. Now invert it, for everything _not_ in the science category. This plays in with how facets are used for drilling in (or broadening!) the search experience. Ahhh, serendipity! Erik On May 27, 2010, at 4:50 PM, Mark Bennett wrote: I'm a big fan of plain old text facets (or tags), displayed in some logical order, perhaps with a bit of indenting to help convey context. But as you may have noticed, I don't rule the world. :-) Suppose you took the opposite approach, rending facets in non- traditional ways, that were still functional, and not ugly. Are there any pubic sites that come to mind that are displaying facets, tags, clusters, taxonomies or other navigators in really innovative ways? And what you liked / didn't like? Right now I'm just looking for examples of what's been tried. I suppose even bad examples might be educational. My future ideal wish list: * Stays out of the way (of casual users) * Looks clean and cool (to the power users) I'm thinking for example a light gray chevron that casual users don't notice, but when you click on it, cool things come up? * Probably that does not require Flash or SilverLight (just to avoid the whole platform wars) I guess that means Ajax or HTML5 * And since I'm doing pie in the sky, can be made to look good on desktops and mobile Some examples to get the ball rolling: StackOverflow, Flickr and YouTube, Clusty(now Yippy) are all nice, but a bit pedestrian for my mission today. (grokker was cool too) Lucid has done a nice job with Facets and Solr: http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/ And although I really like it, it's not a flashy enough specimen for what I'm hunting today. (and they should thread the actual results list) I did some mockups of 2.0 style search navigators a couple years back: http://www.ideaeng.com/tabId/98/itemId/115/Search-20-in-the-Enterprise-Moving-Beyond-Singl.aspx Though these were intentionally NOT derived from specific web sites. Digg has done some cool stuff, for example: http://labs.digg.com/365/ http://labs.digg.com/arc/ http://labs.digg.com/stack/ But for what I'm after, these are a bit too far off of the searching for something in particular track. Google Image Swirl and Similar Images are interesting, but for images. Lots of other cool stuff at labs.google.com Amazon, NewEgg, etc are all fine, but again text based. TouchGraph has some cool stuff, though very non-linear (many others on this theme) http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html http://www.touchgraph.com/navigator.html Cool articles on the subject: (some examples now offline) http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Thanks Geert, Trip Advisor was interesting, I also see another sliders site was sent around. But I don't think all their Facets are binding. For example, to test no-results, I set it to 4 start hotels in SF with a max of $50 / night - obviously not reasonable. But it showed some hotels. At first I thought maybe some cool deals, but then noticed that plenty of them were way under four stars. I could rationalize this by saying that the slider values represent other query parameters, to be weighted in relevancy calculations along with the search terms, but generally not what folks expect. -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513 On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Geert-Jan Brits gbr...@gmail.com wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) Cheers, Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Mark Bennett mbenn...@ideaeng.com I'm a big fan of plain old text facets (or tags), displayed in some logical order, perhaps with a bit of indenting to help convey context. But as you may have noticed, I don't rule the world. :-) Suppose you took the opposite approach, rending facets in non-traditional ways, that were still functional, and not ugly. Are there any pubic sites that come to mind that are displaying facets, tags, clusters, taxonomies or other navigators in really innovative ways? And what you liked / didn't like? Right now I'm just looking for examples of what's been tried. I suppose even bad examples might be educational. My future ideal wish list: * Stays out of the way (of casual users) * Looks clean and cool (to the power users) I'm thinking for example a light gray chevron that casual users don't notice, but when you click on it, cool things come up? * Probably that does not require Flash or SilverLight (just to avoid the whole platform wars) I guess that means Ajax or HTML5 * And since I'm doing pie in the sky, can be made to look good on desktops and mobile Some examples to get the ball rolling: StackOverflow, Flickr and YouTube, Clusty(now Yippy) are all nice, but a bit pedestrian for my mission today. (grokker was cool too) Lucid has done a nice job with Facets and Solr: http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/ And although I really like it, it's not a flashy enough specimen for what I'm hunting today. (and they should thread the actual results list) I did some mockups of 2.0 style search navigators a couple years back: http://www.ideaeng.com/tabId/98/itemId/115/Search-20-in-the-Enterprise-Moving-Beyond-Singl.aspx Though these were intentionally NOT derived from specific web sites. Digg has done some cool stuff, for example: http://labs.digg.com/365/ http://labs.digg.com/arc/ http://labs.digg.com/stack/ But for what I'm after, these are a bit too far off of the searching for something in particular track. Google Image Swirl and Similar Images are interesting, but for images. Lots of other cool stuff at labs.google.com Amazon, NewEgg, etc are all fine, but again text based. TouchGraph has some cool stuff, though very non-linear (many others on this theme) http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html http://www.touchgraph.com/navigator.html Cool articles on the subject: (some examples now offline) http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Hi Lukas, Displaying 2 numbers is an interesting variant. Not for a casual consumer site, but actually pretty cool for a site appealing to engineers. On the formatting front though, the (nn/mm) is a bit visually dense. Might I suggest some tweaks: 1: Drop the parenthesis, in favor of some other visual separation, but cutting down on the number of characters 2: Change the / to (space) of (space) 3: Instead of making the numbers more bold than the text, perhaps go the opposite way, making them non-bold, perhaps smaller or ittallics So instead of: Some value *(50/60)* You'd have: Some value *- 50 of 60* Something like that I'm no artist. -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513 On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.orgwrote: On 27.05.2010, at 23:32, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) yeah i have been pondering something similar. but i now realized that this way the user doesnt get an overview of the distribution without actually applying the filter. that being said, it would be nice to display 3 numbers with the silders, the count of items that were filtered out on the lower and upper boundaries as well as the number of items still left (*). aside from this i just put a little tweak to my facetting online: http://search.un-informed.org/search?q=malariatm=anys=Search if you deselect any of the checkboxes, it updates the counts. however i display both the count without and with those additional checkbox filters applied (actually i only display two numbers of they are not the same): http://screencast.com/t/MWUzYWZkY2Yt regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org (*) if anyone has a slider that can do the above i would love to integrate that and replace the adoption year checkboxes with that
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Haha! Important tooltips are now deprecated in Web Applications. This is nothing official, of course. But it's being advised to avoid important UI tasks that require cursor tracking, mouse-over, hovering, etc. in web applications. Why? Many touch-centric mobile devices don't support hover. For me I'm used to my laptop where the touch pad or stylus *is* able to measure the pressure. But the finger based touch devices generally can differenciate it I guess. They *can* tell one gesture from another, but only looking at the timing and shape. And hapless hover aint one of them. With that said, I'm still a fan of Tool Tips in desktop IDE's like Eclipse, or even on Web applications when I'm on a desktop. I guess the point is that, if it's a really important thing, then you need to expose it in another way on mobile. Just passing this on, please don't shoot the messenger. ;-) Mark -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513 On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Geert-Jan Brits gbr...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the user actually drags the slider. If the user doesn't drag (or hovers over ) the slider 'nr of items left' isn't shown. Moreover, initially a slider doesn't limit the results so 'nr of items left' shown for the slider would be the same as the overall number of items left (thereby being redundant) I must say I haven't seen this been implemented but it would be rather easy to adapt a slider implementation, to show the nr on drag/ hover. (they exit for jquery, scriptaculous and a bunch of other libs) Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org On 27.05.2010, at 23:32, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) yeah i have been pondering something similar. but i now realized that this way the user doesnt get an overview of the distribution without actually applying the filter. that being said, it would be nice to display 3 numbers with the silders, the count of items that were filtered out on the lower and upper boundaries as well as the number of items still left (*). aside from this i just put a little tweak to my facetting online: http://search.un-informed.org/search?q=malariatm=anys=Search if you deselect any of the checkboxes, it updates the counts. however i display both the count without and with those additional checkbox filters applied (actually i only display two numbers of they are not the same): http://screencast.com/t/MWUzYWZkY2Yt regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org (*) if anyone has a slider that can do the above i would love to integrate that and replace the adoption year checkboxes with that
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the : user actually drags the slider. Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the numeric spectrum. it wsa a little more complicated then anything we needed -- and seemed like a real pain in hte ass to implement. i still don't know of anyone doing anything like that, but it's definitley an interesting idea. The hard part is really just deciding what quantum interval you want to use along the xaxis to decide how to count the docs for the y axis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 28.05.2010, at 21:31, Chris Hostetter wrote: : Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the : user actually drags the slider. Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the numeric spectrum. it wsa a little more complicated then anything we needed -- and seemed like a real pain in hte ass to implement. i still don't know of anyone doing anything like that, but it's definitley an interesting idea. The hard part is really just deciding what quantum interval you want to use along the xaxis to decide how to count the docs for the y axis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR kayak.com uses a double slider to handle the flight departure range: http://screencast.com/t/ZjExMTE5 regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind : suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a : max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give : the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the : numeric spectrum. ... : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline : http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR : kayak.com uses a double slider to handle the flight departure range: : http://screencast.com/t/ZjExMTE5 Well, sure ... double bar sliders aren't relaly novel at all -- my point was the idea of putting a sparkline above hte slider, so people had a visual indicator of how many results they would get by adjusting the bars to various poits, before they ever even touched it (as opposed to a tooltip) -Hoss
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Chris Hostetter hossman_luc...@fucit.orgwrote: : Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind : suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a : max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give : the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the : numeric spectrum. ... : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline : http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR : kayak.com uses a double slider to handle the flight departure range: : http://screencast.com/t/ZjExMTE5 Well, sure ... double bar sliders aren't relaly novel at all -- my point was the idea of putting a sparkline above hte slider, so people had a visual indicator of how many results they would get by adjusting the bars to various poits, before they ever even touched it (as opposed to a tooltip) -Hoss Hoss, you mean something like the following? http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/?query=jazzback=defaultNavigation=; (Sorry, it is in Czech language but the web ui is pretty straightforward) Regards, Lukas
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Lukáš Vlček lukas.vl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Chris Hostetter hossman_luc...@fucit.org wrote: : Years ago, when we were first working on building Solr, a coworker of mind : suggested using double bar sliders (ie: pick a range using a min and a : max) for all numeric facets and putting sparklines above them to give : the user a visual indication of the spread of documents across the : numeric spectrum. ... : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline : http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR : kayak.com uses a double slider to handle the flight departure range: : http://screencast.com/t/ZjExMTE5 Well, sure ... double bar sliders aren't relaly novel at all -- my point was the idea of putting a sparkline above hte slider, so people had a visual indicator of how many results they would get by adjusting the bars to various poits, before they ever even touched it (as opposed to a tooltip) -Hoss Hoss, you mean something like the following? http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/?query=jazzback=defaultNavigation=; (Sorry, it is in Czech language but the web ui is pretty straightforward) Regards, Lukas Also http://markmail.org has some nice chart
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
: you mean something like the following? : http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/?query=jazzback=defaultNavigation=; : Also http://markmail.org has some nice chart Yeah ... those are close to what i mean -- but in both cases there is really one big visual graph of a single numeric value (ironicly it's a timeline in both cases) ... i was thinking more along the lines of when a facet UI has *multiple* numeric facets. Imagine if a site like kayak.com for example, that has a search UI with 7 numeric sliders (departure take off time, departure landing time, return take off time, return landing time, layover duration, trip duration, and price) showed you a small sparkline above each slider that showed you where the various options tended to cluster based on the other filters you had applied -- so you can see that most flights have layovers in the ~30 minute range, and the key price point is around $99 ... but when you move the take off time slider to early in the morning the sparkline above layover duration shifts up to longer layovers, and the prices start tnreding up. -Hoss
Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
I'm a big fan of plain old text facets (or tags), displayed in some logical order, perhaps with a bit of indenting to help convey context. But as you may have noticed, I don't rule the world. :-) Suppose you took the opposite approach, rending facets in non-traditional ways, that were still functional, and not ugly. Are there any pubic sites that come to mind that are displaying facets, tags, clusters, taxonomies or other navigators in really innovative ways? And what you liked / didn't like? Right now I'm just looking for examples of what's been tried. I suppose even bad examples might be educational. My future ideal wish list: * Stays out of the way (of casual users) * Looks clean and cool (to the power users) I'm thinking for example a light gray chevron that casual users don't notice, but when you click on it, cool things come up? * Probably that does not require Flash or SilverLight (just to avoid the whole platform wars) I guess that means Ajax or HTML5 * And since I'm doing pie in the sky, can be made to look good on desktops and mobile Some examples to get the ball rolling: StackOverflow, Flickr and YouTube, Clusty(now Yippy) are all nice, but a bit pedestrian for my mission today. (grokker was cool too) Lucid has done a nice job with Facets and Solr: http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/ And although I really like it, it's not a flashy enough specimen for what I'm hunting today. (and they should thread the actual results list) I did some mockups of 2.0 style search navigators a couple years back: http://www.ideaeng.com/tabId/98/itemId/115/Search-20-in-the-Enterprise-Moving-Beyond-Singl.aspx Though these were intentionally NOT derived from specific web sites. Digg has done some cool stuff, for example: http://labs.digg.com/365/ http://labs.digg.com/arc/ http://labs.digg.com/stack/ But for what I'm after, these are a bit too far off of the searching for something in particular track. Google Image Swirl and Similar Images are interesting, but for images. Lots of other cool stuff at labs.google.com Amazon, NewEgg, etc are all fine, but again text based. TouchGraph has some cool stuff, though very non-linear (many others on this theme) http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html http://www.touchgraph.com/navigator.html Cool articles on the subject: (some examples now offline) http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) Cheers, Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Mark Bennett mbenn...@ideaeng.com I'm a big fan of plain old text facets (or tags), displayed in some logical order, perhaps with a bit of indenting to help convey context. But as you may have noticed, I don't rule the world. :-) Suppose you took the opposite approach, rending facets in non-traditional ways, that were still functional, and not ugly. Are there any pubic sites that come to mind that are displaying facets, tags, clusters, taxonomies or other navigators in really innovative ways? And what you liked / didn't like? Right now I'm just looking for examples of what's been tried. I suppose even bad examples might be educational. My future ideal wish list: * Stays out of the way (of casual users) * Looks clean and cool (to the power users) I'm thinking for example a light gray chevron that casual users don't notice, but when you click on it, cool things come up? * Probably that does not require Flash or SilverLight (just to avoid the whole platform wars) I guess that means Ajax or HTML5 * And since I'm doing pie in the sky, can be made to look good on desktops and mobile Some examples to get the ball rolling: StackOverflow, Flickr and YouTube, Clusty(now Yippy) are all nice, but a bit pedestrian for my mission today. (grokker was cool too) Lucid has done a nice job with Facets and Solr: http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/ And although I really like it, it's not a flashy enough specimen for what I'm hunting today. (and they should thread the actual results list) I did some mockups of 2.0 style search navigators a couple years back: http://www.ideaeng.com/tabId/98/itemId/115/Search-20-in-the-Enterprise-Moving-Beyond-Singl.aspx Though these were intentionally NOT derived from specific web sites. Digg has done some cool stuff, for example: http://labs.digg.com/365/ http://labs.digg.com/arc/ http://labs.digg.com/stack/ But for what I'm after, these are a bit too far off of the searching for something in particular track. Google Image Swirl and Similar Images are interesting, but for images. Lots of other cool stuff at labs.google.com Amazon, NewEgg, etc are all fine, but again text based. TouchGraph has some cool stuff, though very non-linear (many others on this theme) http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html http://www.touchgraph.com/navigator.html Cool articles on the subject: (some examples now offline) http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
On 27.05.2010, at 23:32, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) yeah i have been pondering something similar. but i now realized that this way the user doesnt get an overview of the distribution without actually applying the filter. that being said, it would be nice to display 3 numbers with the silders, the count of items that were filtered out on the lower and upper boundaries as well as the number of items still left (*). aside from this i just put a little tweak to my facetting online: http://search.un-informed.org/search?q=malariatm=anys=Search if you deselect any of the checkboxes, it updates the counts. however i display both the count without and with those additional checkbox filters applied (actually i only display two numbers of they are not the same): http://screencast.com/t/MWUzYWZkY2Yt regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org (*) if anyone has a slider that can do the above i would love to integrate that and replace the adoption year checkboxes with that
Re: Sites with Innovative Presentation of Tags and Facets
Perhaps you could show the 'nr of items left' as a tooltip of sorts when the user actually drags the slider. If the user doesn't drag (or hovers over ) the slider 'nr of items left' isn't shown. Moreover, initially a slider doesn't limit the results so 'nr of items left' shown for the slider would be the same as the overall number of items left (thereby being redundant) I must say I haven't seen this been implemented but it would be rather easy to adapt a slider implementation, to show the nr on drag/ hover. (they exit for jquery, scriptaculous and a bunch of other libs) Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org On 27.05.2010, at 23:32, Geert-Jan Brits wrote: Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as bad, hmm, good, great Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) yeah i have been pondering something similar. but i now realized that this way the user doesnt get an overview of the distribution without actually applying the filter. that being said, it would be nice to display 3 numbers with the silders, the count of items that were filtered out on the lower and upper boundaries as well as the number of items still left (*). aside from this i just put a little tweak to my facetting online: http://search.un-informed.org/search?q=malariatm=anys=Search if you deselect any of the checkboxes, it updates the counts. however i display both the count without and with those additional checkbox filters applied (actually i only display two numbers of they are not the same): http://screencast.com/t/MWUzYWZkY2Yt regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith m...@pooteeweet.org (*) if anyone has a slider that can do the above i would love to integrate that and replace the adoption year checkboxes with that
