From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2009-09-01 19:50:09
|
> But I think we might do even more with those facets: Couldn't searching > in facet values be useful, too? At the moment you only get the 5 or 20 > most frequent values of facet fields with no chance of seeing anything > beyond that. Would some kind of "autocomplete search" in facet > categories make sense? Yes, something like this is definitely needed, especially since facets are currently ordered by number of matches, not relevance. I've seen a lot of searches where the facets are all low-relevance matches with a high number of hits (for example, other authors with the same first name but different last names). > And selecting multiple facet values, eg. "English" and "French" or > "Online" and "Articles" or ... (these should be "ORed" than instead of > "ANDed"). > May be pretty tough to design a usable user interface for that. Are > there some examples of that functionality? I don't see any simple way of conveying that graphically (though I'm not a particularly visual person, so I'm not saying it's impossible). I could see an advanced query builder of some sort being useful here; advanced searching in general is something else that needs to be revisited, since the current advanced search page isn't very functional. > We have an experimental interface prototype that does some kind of that > "autocomplete searching" in facets. But it differs totally from the > standard VuFind UI. It's based on a table layout and we put facets on > top of the table in the column headings. Those are searchable. This > thing will be usability tested (not the more or less working prototype, > but a paper mockup)... I'd certainly be interested in hearing your findings. I like the simplicity of the current "Narrow Search" box, and I don't want to make it confusing by adding too many controls... but the current limited functionality needs to be improved, and I'm certainly open to radical redesign if it helps. Do we have any graphic designers in the house? - Demian |