there’s definitely a problem when you present too many facetting dimensions and/or when you present the sequence of facetting dimensions wrongly… but fwiw I think the pattern fails more and harder when there are too few dimensions than when there are too many.

if original air date, channel and genre are the primary (or only) relevant facetting dimensions available in Comcastland, the facetted nav pattern may be an unwise choice. things could get too narrow too quickly. there’s something about a gridded view of what’s on and being able to see adjacent options that you’d lose pretty quickly after allowing customer to narrow too much too soon.

i’m curious to know: is facetted nav being discussed as a replacement for a fixed categorical sort of navigation scheme?

the other thing that looms large for me when I think about facetted navigation is whether or not the site operator has a tool to sculpt the results set that comes back when user clicks on a given facet. if the system being considered allows business rules to govern the ordering of the results returned for a given facet, that’s ideal. one of the arguments for a fixed categorical nav scheme is that it allows us more and better control of the choreography of a user’s visit. bizrules-governed results sets give site operators almost as much control of that choreography of what users see and when as fixed categorical navigation …

We unfortunately suffer from accessities, which is a condition that affects product manager and makes them think that a user should be able to reach everything all of the time from anywhere. We are working on a cure. In the meantime, yes, I am trying to articulate the scenarios of use (which is being very difficult because of the breadth of audience and services) so I can map the specific (facets) for content discovery in a way that it complements the global nav.

I’m frustrated with this challenge because the more I need to change globally to fix this locally, harder it is for me to actually get this done, so I was trying to make as much improvement as possible without proposing much change to the global elements, but that is starting to work against me.

Good times!

Consider the place of the global nav in addition to the facets.

You could align the global nav with main use cases (ie, Recorded TV) and then surface the most commonly used specifications for that use case at top with a +more to unfold additional specs.

Or you could align your global nav with most popular facets.

Just a thought, not understanding the details.

@greg Excellent, looking forward to it!