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
