Following our commitment to a quarterly release cycle, earlier this month we released FindTuner version 2.3.0. As with previous releases, feedback from clients has been instrumental in focusing our efforts on important features and enhancements, as well as continuing to make usability improvements. As always, no release would be complete without squashing a few bugs too. In this post I'd like to highlight a few of the important new features.
New, Customize Facets Action
Facet (aka guided navigation) configuration has been completely revamped with the new Customize Facets action. The feature allows for more intuitive facet and facet value ordering and visibility control. Additionally, all of Solr’s facet definition features - including field, range, interval, pivot and query facets - are available to the merchandiser providing a high level of control in an easy to use interface. Let's take a look at a couple of examples.
A common use-case related to guided navigation is to modify the order and visibility of facets and/or facet values. Looking at the figure below, I have specified a few customizations.
- Manufacturer, Type and Category have been moved to the top of the facet order
- Price and Department have been moved to the bottom of the facet order
- Condition has been hidden
- Within the Manufacturer facet I have ordered facet values and hidden one of the facet values
Note that there may be several other facets that are displayed on the store-front that I have not modified for ordering. Those facets will continue to appear in their natural order beginning after Category and before Price. This behavior is the same for facet values.
The next use-case I'd like to highlight is the ability to (re)define a facet. In the example below I have changed the intervals for the Price facet, customizing the From and To ranges and specifying the labels to display on the store-front. As mentioned, we support creation and definition of Field, Range, Interval, Pivot and Query facets.
Enhanced Rule Triggering
Continuing our focus on enabling personalized experiences, rule triggering capability has been further enhanced to provide even more ability to create highly targeted rule triggering conditions.
- We have added the Regex trigger that provides the ability to use regular expressions on the user's query.
- We have created a "Facet Selected" trigger that as the name implies, enables triggering based on if a facet has been selected. The "is not" condition can also be specified. For this trigger consider the following use-case: A user comes to the site and executes a keyword search that triggers a rule that displays a promotional banner. If the user continues to shop by selecting a facet we may not want to continue to show the promotional banner since they didn't act on it originally. The Facet Selected trigger helps us implement that merchandising decision.
- The "Url Parameter" action allows the merchandiser to add, change or remove URL parameters. A simple example is controlling the number of results returned by Solr.
- The ability to indicate contains/does not contain for keyword triggers is also now available.
Usability improvements
Usability features in this release include the ability to add notes to rules, clone rules, and we've enhanced the rule visualizer application (used for testing rules) for hit highlighting and display of query scoring.
If you are looking to take your Solr-powered ecommerce website to the next level by utilizing merchandising techniques, please reach out to us for a demonstration or checkout our FindTuner page for more information.
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