I'm working on a site and have a bit of a headache.
The site sells products such as books and places on events, as part of the rebuild we want to combine these onto a single results listing page which can be searched by keyword, or navigated to by a taxonomy term which then pre-filters the result set.
The headache comes when trying to set a default sort. On keyword search, relevancy to the keyword makes complete sense. However, on taxonomy term I have an issue.
Latest seems the obvious but as products are relatively timeless and events are very timely this causes an issue as all upcoming events will be higher in the listing than products (which have been uploaded a few months prior but are still relevant.
I could move to something around most viewed, but then the events sort order doesn't seem logical as it makes sense for them to be in date order.
I'm not sure there is a solution to this but if anyone has any suggestions or has solved this UX challenge before then it would be greta to hear!
Cheers