Well. It looks more to me like you are mixing apples and oranges to try to
make something that tastes like a pear.
You've already hit on your problem. The software mirrors the internals of
the system. Users have trouble with that because they don't think in
databases.
In the search field they would type "Jones Company" and "John Jones", in or
out of quotes. And your software would float the John Jones that works at
Jones Company to the top of the results. Followed by Jones Company, because
it was the only result for the company search. Followed by the rest of the
John Joneses you've found.
I still don't see a need for nodes and trees.
The data you've described doesn't logically fit into such a structure. A
person isn't a node, or a branch on a tree. They are a person, who works at
X doing Y, with personal information Z. And X is a company that has
employees A-Z and details 1-10.
It would help to know what exactly this tool is used for. Because it seems
simply like a means for looking up information about people and companies.
Is there more too it? What is the most complicated result users will need?
Will
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Wexelblat" <[email protected]>
To: "William Brall" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2009 7:42 AM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Any good examples of "mixed" IA structures?
Thank you for the response. I probably did make the cases too narrow.
Currently the existing interface is an Access DB bit of hackery that
lacks several features. For example, it requires the user to search
on a particular type of field (company name vs contact name) that
exposes the internal structure of the storage.
Whatever we do I'm going to push the developers to add a full-text
index and a generalized search capability. But my observations of the
users indicates that not having the contextual structure for their
answers is frustrating them.
For example, we may have a contact in the DB named "John Jones". That
may be one of several John Jones. In order to find the right one, the
users need to know that one of the John Joneses is the CEO of Jones
Company. In tests with paper prototypes so far, people have indicated
a preference for presentation of some of the results in a hierarchical
context. But just blanket applying a tree structure to something where
30-40% of the data is a single node with no parent or child seems
inappropriate.
So I'm trying to mix my apples and oranges and come up with some kind
of fruit salad (if you'll excuse the stretched metaphor).
Best,
--Alan
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