In e-commerce, I think it makes the most sense to use faceted navigation when there's more than one criterion by which customers are likely to evaluate products/services--which turns out to be most of the time when you're dealing with a catalog of any size, IMO.
If you have a few items with only two facets, but the majority lend themselves to multiple facets that are meaningful to customers, I don't think that's a problem. But if your catalog consistently supports only two facets (for example, brand and price), each with only a handful of attributes, then faceting may be overkill. The key to making the use of facets make sense, I think, is to find the right facets. It isn't a perfect technique for every situation. If your product hierarchy is very granular, and you then apply faceted navigation on top of it, you may wind up with something like this example from Samsclub.com: http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?pCatgId=5746&dimId=1005746 5 This may not be inherently "wrong" or bad, but it does seem like a lot of work to get to that one product (which is one of two products in the Electronics > Batteries > General Purpose category). Faceting isn't what's wrong with that example, but it's not adding much to the experience either. And if I were shopping for batteries at Sam's Club, the single facet used in that category--price--wouldn't be helpful to me, because I shop for batteries by brand, which is a facet that they didn't use. In general, I'm a big fan of faceted classification both for narrowing large search result sets and for informing navigation. But it's not appropriate for every instance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46764 ________________________________________________________________ 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
