As I begin to learn my way around the analytics of eBay, I’ve been re-impressed by the sophistication of the inventory and user behavior exploring it. eBay’s tried lots of variants within facted browsing over the years. The core model includes dynamic facets across the taxonomy with the attributes appropriate to the current category.
The desktop search UI ( eBay Desktop) goes beyond even this model with a lot of progressive flyout widgetry for full control over multiple value filters.
One notable issue industry wide for faceted browsing systems is the affordance for reducing the constraints. In this non-ebay example, only the bread crumb enables me to remove my price filter directly. eBay extends the facet removal affordance with checkboxes beside attribute filters. I like download.com’s summary of applied filters and X buttons better as a more salient version of a breadcrumb bar. This model is akin to the early Flamenco project rendering. Read more about faceted browsing interfaces at Marti Hearst’s at searchuserinterfaces.com. I’ll be studying the refinement patterns at eBay for ways to advance the state of the art.
We’re off and running in the Jetpack Learning Challenge from Mozilla Education & the MacArthur Foundation. Brian King did a great job with our first seminar and #2 is scheduled for tomorrow.
I’ve crafted a couple firefox chrome templates for use in paper prototyping and will be talking through choosing the right Jetpack UI option as well as larger issues around UI design in Seminar 2 tomorrow. As part of the larger context, I’m encouraging pre-coding efforts at evaluating concepts and UI expressions.
Get the templates and my presentation materials at lab.mozilla.jetpack. The entries cover a wide range of educational contexts and I’m confident the competition will set a high bar!
I’m very excited to be participating in the Mozilla Education JetPack/AddOn Design Challenge as an instructor in Phase 2 of the challenge. Thankfully, we’ve got Brian King along for technical heavy lifting on the code side. I’ll be focused on helping challenge participants create positive user experiences for learning.
All of the basic rules of HCI apply: keep the user informed, match between system and real world, recognition not recall, speak the users language, provide shortcuts, etc. Then we get a whole slew of new concerns around facilitating learning.
I see great opportunities for browser addons to aid sense-making in the early stages of learning a space as well as in elaboration and chunking. Chunking is how humans get beyond the limits of short term memory (the common 7 plus or minus 2 rule) to create richer mental representations.
Even more so, learning ehancements could facilitate connections between people with shared learning objectives, enable novice-expert interactions, and create other social opportunities abound beyond the more obvious rehearsal tools (e.g. flashcards) and ease of information access utilities. Getting the right information at the right time is critically important for the integration of new knowledge into existing understanding.
The focus of the design challenge is on JetPacks but full firefox extensions can also be entered. While add-ons have a huge range of user interface options, the JetPack solution set of UI is more constrained. This should be a nice sandbox for UI patterns. I’ll be teaching a couple classes along the way to a finalist workshop preceding SXSW Interactive.
I’ve got one consumer ready JetPack out there for rotating tabs for a display kiosk but look forward to crafting many more! I’m even dabbling with a multi-touch enabled Firefox on a HP tx2 tablet w/ Windows 7.
Check out the official challenge website for more info. You’ve only got a month to make your submissions. I’ll see the winners in Austin right before SXSWi.
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