[Theforum] Re: Sub-categories
Madhu Menon
webguru at vsnl.net
Sun Dec 16 02:09:45 CST 2001
At 12:55 PM 12/16/2001, Ben Dyer typed these words:
>>Typically, classification ala Yahoo becomes necessary when you have far
>>too much content to place in one category. Putting 300 articles into one
>>category becomes unwieldy.
>
>Agreed...*but*, Yahoo! has how many items in its database? How many does
>evolt have (or will ever have)? If you don't know where Yahoo! classified
>something, you're in deep poop if you can't find it after a few
>tries. With evolt, there are far fewer choices.
Which is exactly what I said. Yahoo has several levels because of their
content. We don't. Hence my suggestion that we not classify evolt too much. :)
>[snip an example]
>
>This is true, *but*, this is based on the thought that this is how users
>will search for articles on the site.
If I were searching for any article *without* using the site search, what
else could I use besides the categories?
>I think that one-level-deeper categories may be more useful in the
>following capacity:
>
>Say you read a great article on ColdFusion (I'm more comfortable there
>than ASP. ;) and you think to yourself, "That was a great ColdFusion
>article, I wonder what other information is here on ColdFusion."
Yes, that's a good use for them too. I often do this.
>If they back up to "Code", it's hit or miss in finding what they're
>looking for, but "Code > ColdFusion", they get exactly that.
You're just agreeing with me :P
>But, then again, others may not be using the site in this way, I'm just
>describing how I might use it. Regardless, how users use the site is the
>first thing we should find out, and the survey will help some with that.
Actually, we didn't ask such questions in the survey. I don't recall seeing
any questions about whether they thought the structure was intuitive,
whether they used the search a lot, etc. So don't expect the results to
tell you much.
In any case, those are best done in actual usability tests where you
*observe* people using the site.
>Very true. But again, there is also a difference between how users act
>versus how they want to act. The only way to find out that is to ask them.
There's a bigger difference between how they *say* they act, and how they
actually do. Asking is not very reliable.
Uncle Jakob is right about this one.
>So, bottom line is, I guess I'm saying that everything keeps coming back
>to the survey results. Once we pore through those, then we'll have our
>answers.
Maybe. We won't find *all* our answers, however.
>And...I'm spent.
I have that effect on people ;)
Cheers,
Madhu
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Madhu Menon
madhu at members.evolt.org
Blog: http://madman.weblogs.com
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