Faceted Search- a guided navigation tool with growing popularity in web 2.0 age. There are many ways to call it before: refined search, filtered search, narrow-down search or even vertical search. The naming convention has become a de facto standard for e-Commerce, product-related shopping websites and most often in travel industry.

Being lost in a search maze is a big disaster to many users, site operators have suffered most eventually. With faceted search, it is destined to help increase findability and speed up search for a desirable item.

In designing a usable faceted search, TG found the major hurdles coming from:

• Too many facets, values and attributes that stakeholders want to display online. They thought the more options provided to users, the more useful and usable they are. Jakob Nielsen in his latest email - “Guesses vs Data as basis for design recommendations” mentioned that excess features can hurt review and users are not quick learner, they tend not to learn

We see how little users care about learning fancy Web techniques. People just want to get in, get their stuff done, and get out. They don’t want to learn.

• Lack of complete understanding of use cases as a result of not having a full analysis of user’s search patterns and behavior, making it difficult to display facets in different scenarios with levels of importance
• Attributes are not mutually exclusive as taxonomy is not well-designed. Users will find facets missing while making their choices
• How to create an effective layout to interact with users? Should it be on the left or at the top? How to capture users’ attention without distracting them from product display? How to create an initutive user experiences in using the facets? How to reasonably group the facets and values according to users’ expectation? How to indicate the facets are selected and unselected. There are many questions to ask in the interactive design level

Authored by Stephanie Lemieux, “Designing for faceted search” gave us a shortlist of Dos and Don’t in using the search tool.  While working on a project to improve faceted search, TG found it a big help in referring to the guidelines.

Another good article is from Jep Castelein, who has done studies in “10 Rules for Faceted Search on Travel Sites”