Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
Beth Jacobson writes:
I think this categorization is the best I've seen so far (mine included). I'd like to see no more than 7-8 major categories though, to make the list seem more accessable and browsable.
Seems like an arbitrary limit to me.
Not entirely. It's common wisdom that ~7 is a 'comfortable' size for a group of items (IIRC, the number was chosen because research that found that the average person can hold ~7 items in short-term memory). If you look around the internet, you'll see that the on the bulk of professionally designed sites, the main menus have ~7 items. (Rene's latest effort has 7 in the top menu.) When there are significantly more, they're usually arranged into no more than 7-8 groups with no more than 7-8 items in each. Scanning (e.g. looking down a list of categories for one that meets a specific criterion) is different from browsing. When scanning, the brain can just throw out items that don't match so the short-term limit doesn't apply. For the new page I'm envisioning though, the emphasis is not on looking for something specific, but looking around and seeing if there's anything of interest. In that situation, a shorter list will seem more inviting and be easier to deal with. This isn't an absolute rule (if someone came up with an ideal categorization with 9, or even 10 items, I'd go for it), but it's a good rule of thumb.
How does adding a level of hierarchy make things "more accessible"? For me, it's quite the opposite: it increases chances that I'll have to browse through insides of several categories because the top-level names are so generic that the library I'm looking for could be in half of them.
Remember, the page layout will be similar to the sample page I put up. Each major category will have a short descriptive paragraph attached to it. Also the page will be flatter than the number of levels suggests. When someone clicks on a top-level category, they'll go immediately to the list of libraries in that group arranged by sub- or sub-sub-category, so it will still only take one click to get to the good stuff. Most of your objections seem to be with the new page's usefulness in searching, and I agree that the arrangement I'm suggesting is less than ideal for that. Maybe the answer is to have separate pages: one for browsing and one for searching. If I understand correctly, David's objection is that that two category pages (or one 'by category' and one 'by type') will be confusing because people have no good way of choosing between them. David, could we avoid this just by changing the name of the new page from 'By Type' to 'Browse the Libraries' or something like that? If we try to make one page work for both browsing and searching, I'm afraid we'll end up compromising on both.