{"id":1780,"slug":"nngroup-faceted-overkill-tradeoff-interaction-cost","title":"Nielsen Norman Group — faceted navigation adds interaction cost and vocabulary/metadata maintenance \"consumes significant financial and human resources\"","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","smb-owner","candid-team"],"topics":["editorial-discipline","cms-workflow","faceted-search"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** NN/g cautions there is a tradeoff — \"the extra power of faceted navigation also adds interaction cost by presenting users with more options to comprehend and manipulate\" — and that vocabulary/metadata maintenance \"consume significant financial and human resources.\"\n\n**Source:** Taylor & Francis / library-science article quoting Nielsen Norman Group, \"Musings on Faceted Search, Metadata, and Library Discovery Interfaces,\" 2023.\n\n**Confidence:** Verified — independent/academic.\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** The honest cost side. The recommendation \"build a structured catalogue\" is not free — there is an interaction-cost overhead for users and an ongoing metadata-maintenance overhead for the business. Anchors the *skip* side ([[rule-skip-faceted-search-below-200-items-stable-shallow]]) and cross-links into cms-workflow.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"nngroup-faceted-search-refinement-definition","title":"Nielsen Norman Group — faceted search refines a large content set; controls + results displayed simultaneously","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-skip-faceted-search-below-200-items-stable-shallow","title":"R2 — Skip faceted search when the inventory is small (~under 200 items), stable, and shallow; a static list is fine","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-searchable-structured-catalogue-working-tool-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the searchable, structured catalogue as a working tool — when records-not-prose pays off (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"hawksearch-few-dozen-products-static-list-fine","title":"HawkSearch (vendor — concedes against interest) — for catalogs of \"just a few dozen products,\" basic search and navigation are adequate","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-skip-faceted-search-below-200-items-stable-shallow","title":"R2 — Skip faceted search when the inventory is small (~under 200 items), stable, and shallow; a static list is fine","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:12.688Z","updated_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:12.688Z"}