There was a PDF circulating the Betley Whitehorne office recently that was full of examples of faceted design. It contained photos of amazing and beautiful objects, buildings and designs incorporating hard, dynamic angles and lines such as the gorgeous HTC Diamond above. However faceted design can also be applied to software and websites.

With software and websites however I’m not talking about visual facets, but invisible ones that allow you to play data. It’s sometimes also called layered navigation. Mozilla’s latest email client, Thunderbird 3 (still in beta), utilises faceted navigation in it’s search results. Rather than being presented with a just a long list of emails matching your search you can drill down into the results so only show them by selected date range, tag, the person who sent it etc. It’s very powerful and simple to use. The little bar chart up the top also changes colour when you hover over items allowing you to visually see when email was received. The Simile Seek Thunderbird add-on does a similar

For a sexier looking example take a look at Nobel Prize Winners on Well Formed Data. It makes handling large amounts of information simple and fun to use. It’s much clearer than reading flat lists. The Dabs website is another that makes good use layered navigation in search results. This makes looking for products much easier as you select price range, brand etc and filter the results to find just what you’re after. It’s something Amazon have now started doing too.

Google has changed the way we use websites, we no longer expect to navigate to pages, we also want to be able to ‘search to pages’ and layered results make that searching even more powerful and focused. I’ve been looking at faceted design and navigation when making sites for Betley Whitehorne and our latest CMS and e-commerce platforms support it. Mixed with traditional keyword searching it creates a very powerful system for your uses to find what they want on your website.

Related posts:

1. The Image Labeler
2. Faceted Concept for Coca-Cola
3. Thunderbird 3 Is Go!
4. UK Government Gets My Vote
5. Google to stop reporting search queries