Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research
A recent entry on Jonathan Batelle's Searchblog discussed the search history feature on HP.com. The blogger reported that he found this feature useful and recommended that other sites have it.
This got me to thinking that in the quest to find relevant information, users probably often stumble upon features of web user interfaces that enable better findability. In other words, HP
informavores are probably
foraging for the
scent of relevant information!
I thought I should point out another feature that has been in place on HP.com for the last couple of years that supports user intention rather directly. We call this Product quicklinks. When a user enters a product name or number, the quick links feature enables one-click access to the relevant destination page be it a product landing page, a product support page, manuals or supplies. Product quick links have proven to be a very popular convenience feature for HP.com users.
Another findability feature that is becoming increasingly popular is faceted navigation (or advanced search brought to the masses). You can experience it here while shopping for consumer notebooks. The faceted classification scheme that sits behind the concept of faceted navigation has, as one of its founding fathers Ranganathan, a Mathematics professor turned librarian in pre-independence south India. (Being from South India myself, I plan to uncover more about him on my next trip!)
You see faceted navigation on all sorts of eTail sites out there. The question of course is which facets are optimal? Or are the facets uncovered by user tagging going to prove themselves more important?
Posted
04-04-2007 5:39 PM
by
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