Something like sliders perhaps? Of course only numerical ranges can be put into sliders. (or a concept that may be logically presented as some sort of ordening, such as "bad, hmm, good, great"
Use Solr's Statscomponent to show the min and max values Have a look at tripadvisor.com for good uses/implementation of sliders (price, and reviewscore are presented as sliders) my 2c: try to make the possible input values discrete (like at tripadvisor) which gives a better user experience and limits the potential nr of queries (cache-wise advantage) Cheers, Geert-Jan 2010/5/27 Mark Bennett <mbenn...@ideaeng.com> > I'm a big fan of plain old text facets (or tags), displayed in some logical > order, perhaps with a bit of indenting to help convey context. But as you > may have noticed, I don't rule the world. :-) > > Suppose you took the opposite approach, rending facets in non-traditional > ways, that were still functional, and not ugly. > > Are there any pubic sites that come to mind that are displaying facets, > tags, clusters, taxonomies or other navigators in really innovative ways? > And what you liked / didn't like? > > Right now I'm just looking for examples of what's been tried. I suppose > even bad examples might be educational. > > My future ideal wish list: > * Stays out of the way (of casual users) > * Looks "clean" and "cool" (to the power users) > I'm thinking for example a light gray chevron ">>" that casual users > don't notice, > but when you click on it, cool things come up? > * Probably that does not require Flash or SilverLight (just to avoid the > whole platform wars) > I guess that means Ajax or HTML5 > * And since I'm doing pie in the sky, can be made to look good on desktops > and mobile > > Some examples to get the ball rolling: > > StackOverflow, Flickr and YouTube, Clusty(now Yippy) are all nice, but a > bit > pedestrian for my mission today. > (grokker was cool too) > > Lucid has done a nice job with Facets and Solr: > http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/ > And although I really like it, it's not a flashy enough specimen for what > I'm hunting today. > (and they should thread the actual results list) > > I did some mockups of "2.0 style" search navigators a couple years back: > > http://www.ideaeng.com/tabId/98/itemId/115/Search-20-in-the-Enterprise-Moving-Beyond-Singl.aspx > Though these were intentionally NOT derived from specific web sites. > > Digg has done some cool stuff, for example: > http://labs.digg.com/365/ > http://labs.digg.com/arc/ > http://labs.digg.com/stack/ > But for what I'm after, these are a bit too far off of the "searching for > something in particular" track. > > Google Image Swirl and Similar Images are interesting, but for images. > Lots of other cool stuff at labs.google.com > > Amazon, NewEgg, etc are all fine, but again text based. > > TouchGraph has some cool stuff, though very non-linear (many others on this > theme) > http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html > http://www.touchgraph.com/navigator.html > > > Cool articles on the subject: (some examples now offline) > http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/viz4all_a.html > > > > -- > Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com > Direct: 408-733-0387 / Main: 866-IDEA-ENG / Cell: 408-829-6513 >
