[Theforum] Re: Sub-categories

[Martin]

On Sunday, December 16, 2001, at 04:07  am, rudy937 wrote:

> <cite>So maybe abolishing
> categories and making a better free-format search tool is the way to 
> go? </cite>

Rudy - there's been research to show that human brains are
wired in 2 different ways. About 50% of people are search-
orientated, ie they dive straight for search and ignore whatever
categories are offered. The rest are browse-orientated, and
will browse with categories until either they do or don't find
what they're after. In the latter case, they will fall back to
search.

Sounds like you (and the guy you're citing) are strongly
search-orientated. But 1/2 the population isn't.

However, most blog-style sites (and we're one because of
the rolling front page) aren't strongly categorised, so there's
a disincentive to browse anyway. We have a very, very flat
IA, so one level of categorisation doesn't really get you very far
in browse-mode - in the cats, you still only have the most recent
articles in that cat.

So just because we don't have very useful categories doesn't
mean that the answer is abolishing them. Maybe the answer
is making them more useful, perhaps with sub-categorisation,
perhaps with making the cat home-pages rating related, rather
than date related, perhaps with something better than either of
those which I haven't thought of, probably with a combination.

Cheers
Martin

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