All: A design issue.
The goal is a web search portal into an on-line catalog of thousands, possibly tens of thousands of SKUs of hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical parts; sprinkled across a dauntingly broad range of categories, types and classes. In which visitors can find their part FAST. Everyone comes to the site with their own mental model of an effective search path. One man's clarity is another's frustration. One visitor might envision his search path as: Hydraulic /Cylinder /Clevis-Mount Another might have in mind: Cylinder /Clevis-Mount /Hydraulic So, a Level1 > Level2 > Level3 hierarchical progression may not work. The search needs to handle Level2 > Level1 > Level3. And so forth, for a plethora of potential paths. Has anyone handled this type of 'free-form, have-it-your-way' search model? Bruce Chitiea SafeSectors, Inc.
