“Sorting a list of options alphabetically has two main benefits. [First,] if users know the name of the thing they want, they can usually find it in the list pretty quickly. [Second,] lazy design teams don’t have to work on figuring out a better structure.”
From Nielsen’s recent Alertbox, Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die. Sound advice, yet often ignored because it really is work to find a viable alternative. Witness a section in our recently released online store, where we tried to order a long list by importance… but are finding that with a long list (several pages), that’s probably not going to be very usable.
posted by Ted Boren
on Wednesday, Oct 06, 2010
tagged with
information architecture,
design