I've gotten a couple people asking me what exactly I mean by "refinements". So let me try to explain them more clearly. They're difficult to describe without an example, so let's use Tower Records Classical Music as an example. That link will open in a new window, so you can follow along.
Notice that on the left-hand side of that page you have a selection of several ways to "Refine" your search. You can refine by Genre, Price, Composer, Musical Period, etc. Suppose we click on Opera. Now we can click into sub-genres of opera like Aria, Arietta, etc. So there's an example of using hierarchy (Arietta is below Opera).
But suppose we don't want to just refine by the type of music; we also want to narrow down to cheap music. So click on Under $7. Notice that there are still several refinements we could choose, although the Format section now only has "Used CD" -- I guess the "Super Audio CDs" were all more than $7.
This is what I mean by refinements -- the way that the website offers up more and more categories that I can use to restrict my search. Notice that it doesn't suggest anything that would lead to a dead end -- that's why once I've chosen "Under $7", I don't get "Super Audio CD" as an option anymore.
Basically what the site is doing is going through the currently selected set of music, and seeing whether there are any subsets that might be of interest. Everytime I click a refinement, I'm limiting myself to a subset of my current selection. Opera was a subset of all classical music, and Under $7 was a subset of Opera music.
I could continue on like this until I got to a small enough number of CD's that I could actually browse through the list and choose one I might like. When we started, there were 56,836 cd's selected. After restricting to Opera, there were only 11,141. After Under $7, there were only 966. If I further restrict my search to "In Stock" and "Live Recordings", then there are only 29 left -- few enough that I can actually browse through them.
I want to emphasize that the point of refinements is that the user does not have to go to a search page in order to get them. They're simply sitting there on the left-hand side, waiting for the user to click. A search page requires the user to think like a programmer, while refinements just require them to act like a regular web surfer.
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Followups to What are Refinements?:Posted on August 6, 2003 10:50 AM
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je_apostrophe had a great summarization of what I mean by refinements:
another way to think about it is zooming in on something and then looking at it from different angles.
Exactly.
Posted by: kim at August 8, 2003 07:35 PM