Guilty: I'm totally talking out of my butt. I don't have the money for studies on this, and my client has a very limited budget.
Maybe someone whose client is actually willing to spend money on testing will try this. Get a few hundred manufacturers together of soft-category items (not stuff like vacuum parts and computers, more like music, clothes, furniture, food). Ask 1/2 of them to pick from a list of categories (or suggest more) and then come up with keywords. Take the other half and then ask them to just come up with keywords. I bet you dollars to dimes that the keyword-only people will come up with twice as many, maybe more. Now get two sets of equally brilliant programmers together with the same budget. Tell one group they need to come up with the best dang category browser they can and the best search engine they can. Tell the second group to put all the money into the search engine. Tell both that the search engine needs to work like people think. Multi-path, positive and negative searches, visually assisted (like tag clouds), easy product removal by keyword. Get two sets of designers, one to fit in categories and search and the other search only. Now ask a group of users from very diverse industries to search for a number of nameless products on those two sites using three or four descriptors and three or four exceptors. Example: blue button-down shirt, large, dress-casual; no cotton, no white buttons, no pockets, not made in China. If I'm right (a VERY big if) some of the category group will try the category browse, and I'll bet a chunk of those get frustrated enough to actually spend less time once they switch to keyword. Now that they're all keyword searching, the keyword-only crowd has twice as many chances to hit a product as the others, and a site that is designed to make that searching more intuitive to use, easier to adjust, and with more keywords to hit on. I bet the search-only crowd has more success, in less time, with less frustration. If categories are that useful, why did all the major search engines drop them years ago? I think it's because they simply aren't helpful with real-world, hard-to-qualify stuff, and the manpower required to categorize wasn't worth it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38306 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
