Comments on: Interface advice: Categorize in many many categories

By: John Sequeira

John Sequeira — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

Here’s an implementation of faceted navigation that might inspire your many many category problem

http://orange.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco.cgi/nobel/Flamenco

it’s open source http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/download.html

I’m a big believer in faceted navigation:

(see http://www.jsequeira.com/cgi-bin/virtualization
)

By: Kai

Kai — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

If you are using a tree structure for your categories and the user needs to select related categories for a content item, you could first present the user with a list of sibling categories (i.e. categories with the same parent as the primary category of the item). Presumably the list of siblings would be relatively short, and relevant too.

By: Michael Yoon

Michael Yoon — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

Option #4 sounds like the best to me, of the ones you mention, perhaps something like http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/

By: Dave Bauer

Dave Bauer — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

How about using the existing category information to suggest categories, with a dynamcially loaded tree as the fallback if that doesn’t help.

That is, once you have choosen the first category, find out what other documents with that category are also categorized under, and suggest those.

By: Hartvig

Hartvig — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

How about less? If you have 3k categories in what scenario are they used – why is there a need for 3.000? Has the need been tested – eventually simulated down to 100 categories?

That would be the first place to look – with 3.000 categories it would probably take longer time to pick categories than to write the original craft.

By: Thijs van der Vossen

Thijs van der Vossen — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

Why does Greenpeace think they need 3000 categories for organizing their documents?

By: Tanya

Tanya — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

@1 What John said. I would see if the categories (or perhaps they’re really descriptors) can be sorted to allow parametric browsing.

By: Lars Pind

Lars Pind — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

That’s a perfectly valid question.

I think that if the taxonomy is clear enough, that can be completely reasonable. I think the "ICD":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD has thousands and thousands of categories. If people understand the taxonomy and know how to navigate it, it can be the right thing.

I don’t know if it’s right for Greenpeace, and frankly, I don’t think it matters. Whether there’s 500 or 3000, we still need a good interface, and the one we have wasn’t good even when the number of categories were in the low hundreds (sorry, Yon!).

But the current set of categories has evolved from a much smaller set, and it hasn’t been completely mindless: There’s been card sorting and stuff

By: Lars Pind

Lars Pind — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

@Michael Yoon: Thanks a bunch for the link. Seeing something in action as great, and this is a very good way to solve it.

By: James Melzer

James Melzer — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:59:38 +0000

More use case info would be helpful. Are there catalogers that catalog everything, or are these random business users cataloging for themselves?

If the former, then known-item searching is probably the the fastest and best interface. They’ll know the taxonomy or have a paper copy to refer to taped to the wall of their cube.

On the other hand, if this is for lots of ‘amateur’ end users cataloging their own materials, I’d go the opposite direction. Their first few visits, show them the whole taxonomy (which sucks, as you said) but remember what categories they used. After a few visits, show their favorite categories first, with the option to see or search the entire list. Chances are, they’ll be using the same small set of categories over and over, so this will speed up their work a lot (and make the interface simpler and faster.