Hierarchical facets
Axel gave me a nice lesson yesterday about hierarchical facets, something I didn’t really know much about. (Or, if I did, didn’t know it had a name.)
He envisions hierarchical facets as a way to display the shipping information for our locales and I want to see his sketch of that.
I began to think that we might use this technique to organize the information on Mozilla’s localization dashboard more effectively.
Axel passed me this example, which I really liked. I began daydreaming of something like this as a way to display the content on our dashboard.
Where I see…
…the “subject” section in this example, we could present “product” or “localization”…
…the “format” section, our dashboard would display whatever we didn’t choose in the “subject” section…
…opportunities for new sections (not seen in the example), we could display open bugs that could link to Pascal’s web-parts dashboard page, tracking bugs for finishing a localization, or Stas’s web services bugs.
…a real chance to daydream, we might display a fourth section showing remaining untranslated strings in a locale.
What other sections could we add?
That sounds like you want to filter on columns in the current display on the dashboard, is that right?
Precisely, that is where I am going. But, in the hierarchical facets concept, the tree structure is what we would have to discuss. In the columns on l10n dashboard, do we start with locale? Product/tree? Then, what falls in line after that?
To me, the beauty of faceted browsing is really that you’re not having a hierarchical navigation structure. I’d really only use a hierarchical facet at those spots where offering an option doesn’t make sense.
Shipping-in is such a data point, where you could offer a selection “shipped in 3.0.x” by grouping all the 3.0.1 through 3.0.7 together.
Another possible hierarchical facet could be the tiers facet. The list of tiers might be different between Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec.
“I’d really only use a hierarchical facet at those spots where offering an option doesn’t make sense.”
That makes even more sense. I guess I was only looking at it from a navigation standpoint. But, you’re totally right.
Tiers…I so don’t want to talk about tiers.