New user interface design using facets browsing/filtering

See FacetedClassificationInMoin, FacetsEngine, PagesHierarchy for background and FacetMap for another UI proposal.

Design principles

System pages

System page are different from specific wiki pages:

Main System pages:

Wiki specific pages

Wiki specific pages are a big mess:

Using facet to classify those page is the simples thing for the users and administrator. Using the bottom up way, we can have an up to date view of the wiki at all times.

User pages

Users have 2 important pages:

And some might want to use these, although browses already handle them:

Layout

This is first sketch:

screenshot.png

Do play with the test page at http://nirs.dyndns.org/~nir/FacetsBrowsing.html or download: FacetsBrowsing.tar.bz2

Comments about the design:

(On RTL wikis this will be reversed)

multipleTerms.png

Typical user tasks

This is a description of typical user tasks. Complex description and many clicks (M$ Windows style) means bad interface. Simple description and few clicks means easy to use interface.

Checking whats new: RecentChanges

  1. Click on RecentChanges

Browsing for help on formating text

  1. Click on Help
  2. Select the HelpOnFormatting from the familiar well organized HelpPage (today this page is buried under HelpOnEditing)

Browsing an esoteric help page: HelpOnXmlPages

  1. Click on Help
  2. Click /AdvancedTopics

  3. Select HelpOnXmlPages

Learning about ways to find options

  1. Click on Find
  2. Use advanced search or choose one of the many indexes

Browsing wiki specific pages: high ranked market pages

  1. Click on About if its collapsed
  2. Click on MoinMarket

  3. The browse interface opens in the content area, listing all the pages marked with that topic
  4. Narrow the search by selecting *** from the Rank menu

  5. Narrow the search even more by selecting another facet value
  6. Click on the page link, like ThemeMarket

Searching for pages or text

We can mix facet and search - let the facet selection filter the search results, just like they filter the browser results. We can think of it as browse in the search results, or search in the browser. I don't really know how it is going to work, but it seems great feature for the user. Imagine you could do this in Google search results.

  1. Enter search terms in the search box and click enter
  2. Narrow the search results by selecting values from facets on the side bar
  3. Click on a page link

Problems

This is the hard part in this design. Some issues to solve:

How to add and remove terms from a facet?

Multiple term selection or single selection

How to reset the browsing/filtering?

Mixing browsing and indexing schemes

We can use the facet to browse in every view of the wiki.

The biggest problem with mixing is confusion: a use might look at a filtered view and think it is a complete view. If we don't design it properly, this can harm SoftSecurity of the wiki.

A possible solution might use different color for the content view when you use filtering/browsing. Like white background for full view, and light yellow or light blue for a filtered view. This with the same color used in the browse bar, can solve this problem.

Maybe we need also to changed the titled for a filtered view, like: Recent Changes (Partial View)

Huge wikis

Can we use this design for wikipedia? This kind of wiki might have 50-100 terms in its About facet.

What if the wiki has 20 facets? too much to fit in a side bar.

Although most wikis are not about "Everything", we need a design that can scale.

How to show pages lists

How can we add this to the classic theme?

We can choose two options:

We don't have to support 10 themes, we can publish one good theme and let other people write and share their own themes using ThemeMarket.

How to mark pages with facet values

Setting values should be easy, or people will never do it, and the browser interface will not help anybody.

How to define facets and values?

Adding or deleting new values should be easy, but an explicit operation.

Check http://www.kimbly.com/cgi-bin/diamond - in this wiki, the list of facets is updated automatically when you add a new value in page meta data. This totally wrong. Defining facets is a delicate job and should be done with a lot of thought, not by spelling error or careless user (or a spam robot).

Creating too many needless values will make working with the menus/lists practically impossible, you will always have to scroll to find something.

We can set all the facets values in one wiki pages called MoinFacets, using a simple list:

Add or remove from the list to add facets and values:
 * About
  * Development
  * Market
  ...
 * Kind
  * ...

Then we can let the use add facets and values with a menu or by hand, or both.

Discussion

(Moved from FacetedClassificationInMoin)

It would be very good to be able to filter the search to only certain wikispaces (facets or pairs of facets/value). However, we should be very careful of mixing search and tree-like access.

Users asume that usually a tree is something fixed. If we use it as a filter they could wipe out of their view a great deal of the wiki without knowing.

However, this doesn't apply to the search specific page. In that particular place users will understand that facets are working as filters, specially since the facets will be shown/used with another user interface widget that will not resemble a tree.

Which specific widget, depends on the relation between power and simplicity that we want.

-- EduardoMercovich.


I've found a very simple script that uses CSS to colapse/expand, see it http://gaiasur.inspiro.com.ar


why the user part is last? althought this could be fine tuned with Themes

MoinMoin: FacetBrowsingTheme (last edited 2007-10-29 19:21:14 by localhost)