Categories 101

By organising your information into categories, loading them in advance to enable instant navigation, and by allowing users to filter out only the items of interest, Finanz Tools can provide a profoundly more satisfying user experience.

The Internet has become a primary source of information about:

• products, and
• services,
  

and many other kinds of information as diverse as:

• job advertisements,
• medical information,
• news articles,
• entertainment reviews and schedules, and
• general corporate and government information.

In many cases, these items can be naturally organised on a hierarchical basis. For example, "digital still camera" might be a category within a more general "cameras" category within an "audio & visual" category of "appliances". Similarly, mortgage product information might be categorized as "personal banking->products->home loans".

Many website designs fail to apply these natural hierarchies effectively. There is no standard way of organising even basic information, resulting in a proliferation of vastly different user experiences across the Internet, many of which are unhelpful to the end-user.

Finanz Tools not only provide a simple, consistent, and transparent view of these hierarchies, but can also download all or part of the category structure in advance. Prefetching categories enables users to explore the structure without having to wait for any further server responses.

Many content designers adopt a policy of bombarding the user with large numbers of links to lower level categories, and constantly offer the links that matter most to them, regardless of the user's current interest. For example, many:

• shopping sites:
  
  
• offer a confusing barrage of links, that are essentially categories, at all stages of navigation, attempting to give direct access to more products with less server interaction. This is generally counterproductive because it obscures what is of interest, and also increases the page size and download time, making multi-step navigation a slow and cumbersome process.
  
  
• guess what the user might want by offering links to what they perceive to be popular categories, irrespective of what a particular user is actually interested in.
  
  
• banking sites:
  
  
• needlessly offer entry points to their "hotspots", like Internet Banking and application taking, on every page. This just adds unnecessary clutter and confusion; a user is more likely to find what they want and stay on the site if you can make their exploration process simple, uncluttered and instantly rewarding.
  
  
• fail to adopt a consistent approach across their product ranges. Some banks adopt radically different approaches for their business, personal and corporate banking clients, and have another model again for their shareholders. Some banks even offer different models within one area, such as personal banking, where there may be no consistency between savings, deposit accounts, mortgages, credit cards and personal loans for example.
  
  
• telecommunications sites contain a wealth of information but suffer from excessive circular links, confused and overlapping categories, and tend to grossly overload the real-estate on every page with confusing and generally unhelpful content.

Finanz Tools directly address all of these issues by:

• pre-fetching category information in advance. Because it is only the category information, and not whole web pages being fetched, the amount of data in a 1,000 category structure is often no more than a single webpage of a traditional website. Thus the download startup delay is no worse than an existing website.
  
  
• providing a consistent and logical view of categories that is applicable across all products and all services of all departments of an organization in all industries.
  
  
• removing the need to barrage the user with multiple "just in case" links; because all categories are instantly accessible locally, there is no penalty for the user in randomly clicking on categories to explore the web of offerings.
  
  
• supporting a cleaner less cluttered category structure. This allows the user to focus on only a small number of relevant choices at any stage without feeling overloaded or bombarded with irrelevant options. There is no need to guess what a user might want if s(he) can easily get there following the minimal guidance of the category structure.

Features
About Categories	Yes
Features of Online Selectors	Yes
Benefits of Online Selectors	Yes
Basic Concepts	Yes
Mainstream Computing	No