Suggestive Search Pattern for reducing categorical options
15 Apr 2010 - 10:59am
1 reply
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Powers
2008
Let's say you have a browsable hierarchical taxonomy of categories. These categories can be up to like 7 deep, and number in the hundreds. A user can expand and contract the various trees of categories. Clicking on one of the categories will take you to a page detailing the category.
From my standpoint this almost becomes unmanageable or usable because of the sheer quantity of options. I was thinking that a better option would be to have a search field at the top of the tree that as you search, the options that match your string input become more visable and expand, and other options that do not match the string would be removed.
Has anyone ever seen an example of this?
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Check out the brand filtering on Endless:
http://www.endless.com/Mens-Shoes/s/ref=sr_nr_cat?ie=UTF8&sort=shoesbrowserel2&node=241993011
It doesn't deal with showing a hierarchy, but you get the idea... There are a bunch of solutions to showing the hierarchy: show the ancestry in tree form, show the ancestry flattened into each item, or don't show the ancestry at all (only works if node names are unique).