[Clipart] Browsing interface

[Carl Worth]

I'd like to renew a discussion about the browsing interface on the website.

This week, I sat down with my brother who is writing a computer game. He
wanted some interesting graphics for the tiles in the game, and we
thought openclipart.org would be a great place to look, (which it was
--- thanks!).

But, we did find the browsing interface a bit awkward.

We started at the top level and decided that an animal theme might work
well for his game. So, we clicked on "Animals" and saw the single
scorpion. I had gone through this before, so I knew that there were
actually more animals in sub-categories. We clicked through into each
sub-category in turn and found the following number of animals in each
category:

	Animals (1)
		Birds (2)
		Fish (1)
		Insects (3)
		Mammals (13)

So, there are 20 thumbnails there, but it requires a minimum of 2 clicks
per sub-category (total of 8 clicks and page loads) to browse through
them all. Additionally, these two clicks are in separate elements of the
website. Going deeper in the hierarchy requires using the menu on the
left, while going up requires using the "You are here" path across the
top.

These same 20 thumbnails could have been displayed on a single page at
the top "Animals" category, which would have required 1 click instead
of 8.

Is there really a compelling reason for not displaying the items that
belong to sub-categories when viewing a more general category? For
example, viewing "Entertainment" results in the primary screen real
estate being totally wasted as there are no items except in
sub-categories. It would make more sense to me to display as many items
as fir the user-specified criteria up to this point, (and maximize use
of the screen).

A related problem may occur with a category such as "Computer" which
displays a fair number of items (currently 21). It may be far from
obvious to a non-expert user of the website that there are actually many
more (about 60) pieces of computer-related clipart hiding under the
"Icons" and "Network" sub-categories.

So, I can think of a few things to help with these problems:

	1) Display item counts next to category names in the
           menus. These counts should include sub-categories so that
           when the user sees "Computer (81)" but only 21 things on the
           screen, she knows to look deeper for more.

	2) Combine the two separate navigation menus. A simple thing to
           do would be to just place the current path immediately above
           the menu on the left. For example, the user might see:

		You are here:
		home / Computer / icons
			Actions
			Apps
			Devices
			...

	   The important things is that these should be combined within
	   the same structural element of the website.

	3) At any level in the hierarchy, display thumbnails for all
           items in the current category and in all sub-categories.

For item #3, I know that I would love to be able to casually browse
through hundreds of thumbnails by just clicking "next" on each page, (or
clicking to a specific page). Even being able to examine the entire
collection this way would be quite useful for certain kinds of casual
browsing.

Thoughts, reactions?

-Carl