But you knew in advance what you wanted to see, right? Screw mount Leica bodies. And you drilled down from there. That's not browsing. That's searching. And no one is saying that searching is overly broken in the new version. Produces some debatable results on occasion. But not really broken, and probably better than it was previously.
Browsing is when you don't know what it is you are looking for. You have no specific item in mind. You just want to see what they have. It's window shopping. If you buy something, it's an impulse purchase. Probably something that's been in the back of your mind for a long while, and percolated to the forefront only after you unexpectedly found one while grazing. Yes, expensive items can also fall into that category.
That's the gist of many of the complaints here. Explicit searching and implicit browsing are two completely different ways of presenting and thus interfacing with the available data. The new UI strongly favors query searching at the expense of random browsing.
Query searching, as your example confirms, is an exclusionary process. You are trying to weed out the stuff you can't have in order to distill the results down to the set of things you can have. Random browsing is an inclusionary process. You are trying to maximize the stuff you can see in order to determine if anything in those larger results might contain something you can have.
Due in part to their strong public refusals thus far to entertain the wishes of the browsers, I have to assume that KEH has done their marketing demographic homework and have determined that they will pick up more new eager searchers than they will lose dissatisfied browsers.
My position is that those two groups are not mutually exclusive of one another. That there is no reason that with careful interface design they cannot have the best of both worlds. Only time will tell...
Ken
Browsing is when you don't know what it is you are looking for. You have no specific item in mind. You just want to see what they have. It's window shopping. If you buy something, it's an impulse purchase. Probably something that's been in the back of your mind for a long while, and percolated to the forefront only after you unexpectedly found one while grazing. Yes, expensive items can also fall into that category.
That's the gist of many of the complaints here. Explicit searching and implicit browsing are two completely different ways of presenting and thus interfacing with the available data. The new UI strongly favors query searching at the expense of random browsing.
Query searching, as your example confirms, is an exclusionary process. You are trying to weed out the stuff you can't have in order to distill the results down to the set of things you can have. Random browsing is an inclusionary process. You are trying to maximize the stuff you can see in order to determine if anything in those larger results might contain something you can have.
Due in part to their strong public refusals thus far to entertain the wishes of the browsers, I have to assume that KEH has done their marketing demographic homework and have determined that they will pick up more new eager searchers than they will lose dissatisfied browsers.
My position is that those two groups are not mutually exclusive of one another. That there is no reason that with careful interface design they cannot have the best of both worlds. Only time will tell...
Ken