Website feature requests: Sorting Results by Date, Organizing/Tagging Forums by Topic
Hi, I’m a new member from the lay public, doing some research for home improvements. My experience of the site is that there is a lot of great info here, but it is quite hard to find because the architecture and search features for the site are so primitive. I’d like to see this site succeed and reach an even bigger audience, and that end, I am offering some constructive criticism.
This website is the primary point for delivering value to your subscribers, but it is set up a lot like a wordpress site from 2005, providing functionality that is 20 years out of date. That is especially frustrating at the premium subscription rate being charged. I’m pretty sure that everyone on this site can speak to the power and value of hiring a professional for at least some part of the design and construction of a building. The same is true for a website. Invest in some pro help with the information architecture of your digital house.
What would they do? There are two things that leap out to me as starting points:
1) options to sort or filter the search results
2) topic groupings for the content
Right now when I search, articles are being returned by some sort of “most relevant” algorithm. That frequently means my top search results are 8-12 years out of date. For faster moving tech (like heat pumps), that’s quite dated. The criteria for relevancy should probably be tweaked, but moreover the ability to sort search results by date should be added. This would be a major improvement in functionality with very little cost or effort to implement. Some readers would probably also welcome the ability to filter results by media type (articles, Q&A, plans, news, etc).
Similarly, it would facilitate much more productive browsing and learning if the media here could be grouped into general topics (plumbing, HVAC, solar, building materials, etc), not just various blogs that can be scrolled through in chronological order. This would take a bit more effort and planning to set up, but the most practical way would probably be to implement a tagging system with a standardized vocabulary. This would allow people to find the relevant collections of information here much more easily, as well as to create feeds or notifications for the topics that interest them. Chronological blogs are great for regular readers, but terrible for people coming here to research specific topics, and a pretty substantial number of people in your forums seem to report being the latter.
Just my $0.02 towards the green building mission!
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Replies
Could not agree more. The search feature here is almost useless, and takes away from the value of this site. If I really want to find something, I enter the following in a google search bar - this example is to search for energy monitoring in the q&a. You would substitute your search term and the section of the site you want to search:
energy monitoring site:greenbuildingadvisor.com/question
Yes, I use the site search operator on Google constantly! It's a bit depressing how much I have to rely on it, actually, when so often a good local search feature would work better. If your business is selling people information, then it really makes sense to invest in helping them get value from that information. With a local search feature, you can design what kind of summary info users see and offer multiple sort and filter options, for example. I guess most of the internet isn't selling information at this point-- they are using information to lure people over to the ad space they are selling. But this site actually IS still selling info, and at a pretty hefty price, so they should definitely invest in organizing it better.
I agree. Note that apparently the search supports some but not all boolean operators. But in general it feels like a software package designed to "maximize engagement" rather than archive information.
I miss the 1998-2008 era internet, when sorting by basic parameters was a given. I never would have predicted our current day iteration of "make the users so lost they have to keep coming back or potentially lose out on information".
Author Corey Doctorow has coined a name for the process whereby platforms become progressively worse as they cater less and less to the users. He calls it "enshittification." For example:
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/