[Zope-CMF] Searching vs. browsing

[Timothy Wilson]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, marc lindahl wrote:

> Check out
> http://cmf.zope.org/Members/grifter70000/color_guide

Wow, this one link is going to save me a ton of work. Thank you!

This also brings up an issue that I've recognized with the CMF recently. My
sense is that navigation in a CMF-enable Web site, and cmf.zope.org in
particular, are overwhelmingly search-oriented. The link given above and the
content it provided were readily available with a quick search (it was 6th
in the list of items returned when I used "stylesheet" as the search term),
but completely invisible to a site visitor otherwise.

Jakob Nielsen talks quite a bit about the need to make sure content can be
found by "searchers" and "browsers."

"My usability studies show that slightly more than half of all users are
search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest
exhibit mixed behavior. The search-dominant users will usually go straight
for the search button when they enter a website. They are not interested in
looking around the site; they are task-focused and want to find specific
information as fast as possible. In contrast, the link-dominant users prefer
to follow the links around a site. Even when they want to find specific
information, they will initially try to get to it by following promising
links from the home page. Only when they get hopelessly lost will
link-dominant users admit defeat and use a search command. Mixed-behavior
users switch between search and link-following, depending on what seems most
promising to them at any given time, but they do not have an inherent
preference." (Nielsen 224)

I am not a search-dominant user. I use both techniques, but I do get
frustrated when I visit a site and I'm forced to use the search feature to
find what I want. The "me-centric" approach of the CMF would seem to require
heavy use of the search functions. I'm hoping that Topics will be the tool
that will allow me to present content in a way that site visitors can find
easily by browsing.

Any comments?

References
==========
Nielsen, Jakob, "Designing Web Usability", 2000.

Later,
Tim

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