: managers and test users happy. The use case that often came up was the : ability to dynamically drill inside ranges. For instance my first : search for 'computer on a large ecommerce site might yield ranges of : 0-500, 500-1000, 1000-2000, 2000+, selecting 500-1000 might then yield : ranges of 500-600, 600-700 and so on. There are also many different
that's a very differnet behavior from what i described ... what you are talking about is really "sub faceting" or "hierarchical faceting" ... the user chooses a constraint in a facet, and now new "sub-constraints" are available for that facet. (a more general example of this use case is: once a constraint is picked for one facet, new facets are offered. ie: only offer a "city" facet once a constriant has been selected for a "state" facet. sub-ranges in the same facet are just a special case of this) the behavior i was warning against is changing the constraints offered in facetA (price) becuase a constraint has been sleected in facetB (category or something else) ... a good faceting UI should allways take away optiosn htat no longer apply (so if by picking "accessories" the set of results has shrunk so that there are no matches in the $100-200 range, then take that option away) but changing the list of posisble constraints the user can choose from when they make a selection in a completley unrelated facet is a really bad UI design .. one of the keys of a good facet UI is that it lets the user browse they way they want to browse, adding constraints and removing constraints as it makes sense to them, you don't want to alienate them by changing the set of options you give them for a field just because the statistical breakdown changes slightly. imagine you are a film director using an "actor search engine" to help you cast a part in your movie... you come to the site, and start clicking on constraits to help you narrow the options. when you first come to the site you have age ranges listed: 1-10, 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-50, 50-60, 60-80 ... you click on "juggling" in the "special skills" facet and because there are onlytwo actors who can juggle available in the application now your age ranges dynamicly change to 1-40 and 40-80 because one of hte actors is 20 and the other is 60 and these rnages give yo uan even statistical division of hte availbale pool ... but it doesn't add anything to the user experience, it makes it harder for the director quickly see that they can't hire a 30-50 year old juggler because the statistical range selection took away information when it resized the ranges. -Hoss
