good search state – forrester

The Forrester research library is not designed in any impressive way, but it’s decent, and the search state signaling pops out pretty well.

decent left nav – dawdle

Another example of a nice classic left nav implementation can be found at Dawdle.

zero results page, yelp

zero results page, ebay motors

varied and customized faceted navigation, endless.com

Faith just sent me a link to endless, pointing to their faceted navigation. It’s a classical implementation in a left nav bar, but you can see that they put thought into each navigator specifically, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. I haven’t used the site extensively yet, but it seems like it would work nicely.

Category navigator:

Brand navigator (multiple select as well as keyword search), color family, and shoe size:

Heel height and price:

One thing i’m not sure works well is their search state breadcrumbs. They are in the left nav, where you selected them instead of somewhere more visible.

starting over, two examples

kayak

trulia

ncsu libraries & endeca, traditional faceted browsing

A faceted browsing classic. NCSU Libraries search, powered by Endeca (via Findability.org)

search state, wigix

search state is on top of results, the place to undo is in the left nav, where you selected it (see way at the bottom). wigix.

guardian jobs – left nav

Interesting approach to breadcrumbs/search state in the left navbar. I like that it very clearly states “Expand” and has both a start again option as well as removing individual facets.

I also like that each facet navigator starts with “Narrow by:”. It might be redundant, but also might make each individual navigator more clear.

from guardian jobs.

guardian jobs – listing display options

- Interesting display of individual listings — condensed, succinct.

- You can switch to “descriptive” listing style (I like the wording of “compact” vs “descriptive”).