Level 51
Ask your users and look to other websites have similar system.
Aug 3, 2022
4
Level 6
Should filters be "XOR", "OR", or "AND"? What is the most useful for users?
We are working on building a set of filters to narrow down query results from the database. One of the filters is special services filter. The way the filter currently works is by letting users select multiple types of special services, and then the code filters for any results that have any of the selected items, so it is an inclusive or filter. You can filter for service A, B, C, and it will return all results where a provider has A, or B, or C, or any combination of the three.
What is considered best practice or standard practice when it comes to these kinds of filters? Is it standard for filters to be inclusive OR, XOR, AND? It makes sense to me that the filters are "OR" but I can easily see situations where someone filters for a specific combination of things, having hyper-specific needs as a consumer / customer.
What are your thoughts?
Level 2
You should sort the results by relevance. That should satisfy the user.
Level 6
@sidanalavi We are using user feedback to build our filtering, but I was just curious if there was a convention or "standard" way to filter that is generally accepted as the basic first-step.
Level 2
@garrettmassey I dont know if it will work with your case but whenever i am making filters i get results from both AND and OR showing AND results first as they are more relavant to user then the OR results, By this way we never end up small number of data.
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