Epicurious.com is food site originally targeting the haute cuisine crowd. Soon they realized the market was much larger for the typical consumer hoping to expand their cooking horizons. By expanding their metadata to leverage the community (ratings) and to include content facets meaningful to the user (Easy to make meals) they were able to address entirely new use cases beyond the traditional taxonomy of a cookbook.  A favorite use case of mine is “What can I make for dinner with the food in my refrigerator?” Supply a few ingredients you have on hand and the site provides recipes to make for dinner along with ratings from others in the community and a nicely paired wine. This approach means revisiting your metadata with a more flexible and sympathetic eye to the user and rethinking your data architectures to meet the needs of common user tasks. The result will often lead to new views of data that do not currently exist. Providing these alternative views will promote user exploration and may be the differentiator between success and failure of your search / results solution navigation pattern.

Microsoft had a huge problem they decided to tackle with their Office 2007 products. Word 1.0 started out as a simple word processor with about 50 features and now has grown to a robust product with over 600 features. Feature creep had expanded products like word to the point that many key and useful features were never discovered or used by a large percentage of users. To address this problem, they created Navigation Ribbons at the top menu level to expose these features both visually and textually. Initial reaction from users has been mixed. Experienced users often bristled initially at the new approach. This was to be expected since we know that once you install habits in users they naturally resist change.  New and intermittent users performed better and began discovering ‘new’ features and leveraging more of the product functionality.