Information Management Weblog

When good classifications go bad...

I recently found this menu lurking on the Bumbershoot (Seattle Music Festival) website:

Yikes! I almost don't know where to start with this one.

First of all, stacking tabs is almost always a bad idea. As you can see, there is a whole lot going on there, and I pity the poor user who tries to use this to navigate. Plus, it doesn't look very good. The square little tabs don't fit well with the site's funky design.

But, an even bigger problem seems to be a fair amount of confusion in the classification arena. They've mixed and matched their classifications to the point where its hard to tell what they were thinking. But, I see the beginnings of a nice faceted classification scheme. Let's try to tease out what is really happening here:

The first facet is time. They have a tab for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Next, there is a series of items relating to the type of activity: Art (presumably visual art), Dance, Theater, Comedy (Stand-up?), Film, Literary, and Crafts. We'll throw Food into this list as well.

I'm not quite sure what "Fun" refers too. And I'd be willing to bet that most users to the site wouldn't know what's under that either. A quick click reveals that it's probably the category they used when they couldn't find another category that fit.

Then we have "Kids." I suppose it could be considered a type of activity, but it seems more like an audience. But it is the only audience-specific tab up there. Confusing? Yup.

Finally, we have musical genres listed: Blues, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Electronica, Indie/Punk, Rock/Roots, and Jam/World.

In place of their jumble of tabs, I'd look at creating a faceted navigation system. The facets would be: time, type of event, audience, and genre. Using this system would make things a heck of a lot more clear, and help users navigate their way to the info they need.