The Nike Store provides an excellent faceted navigation for narrowing product listings by sensible facets including gender, product type, sport, color, and price. The site skins the faceted classification tool provided by Endeca, which allows the user to select a product attribute of interest under any facet, and continually provides feedback about the attributes in other facets that can be used to narrow your choice of products down. Nike's Flash-based implementation is appropriate and useful, and ranks among the best examples of faceted navigation you will find on either commercial or academic databases.
I still think http://epinions.com is *the* best implementation of a faceted browse I've ever seen. Much more advanced than Nike as far as I can tell. ebay.com also has a reasonable implementation, but it's at the level of Nike: not bad but could be better.
What both sites do well is allow you to begin filtering from any point, e.g. selecting a term under any facet while navigating or as a post-search filter. Where some Endeca-based filtering UIs like Nike differ is that they allow you to remove a term under any facet without having to navigate back up the path you initially took to narrow.
epinions' faceted drill-down, on the other hand, feels very linear. Let's say you searched for cell phones, and somehow filtered down to "Electronics," "Cell Phones," "Nokia". Now let's say you wanted to get rid of Cell Phones, but still want "Electronics" and "Nokia" so you can view Nokia's n800 and n801, for example. You can't, given the interface they've provided. They give you a breadcrumb so you can back up, but no way to just clear out a part of your filtering selections. It's a lot more of a directed approach.
The Nike example, on the other hand, would let me select "Men's," "Footwear," "Casual," "Black," "$125 and under." I can just choose to clear out "Casual" at any time and just get "Men's," "Footwear," "Black," "$125 and under" and now see all the black shoes $125 and under. The order doesn't matter in this scenario. That's really giving users the power to explore. Even if there is a slightest bit of figuring out at the onset, this really suits the type of exploring you might do with this discreet set of products and is much more flexible in my opinion.
Does a lot look like the L'Oreal Paris site. Same designer?
http://www.loreal-paris.fr
Yup. R/GA is the agency that did both the Nike and L'Oreal Paris sites.
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