Designing Search (part 1): Entering the query

In an earlier post we reviewed models of information seeking, from an early focus on documents and queries through to a more nuanced understanding of search as an information journey driven by dynamic information needs. While each model emphasizes different aspects of the search process, what they share is the principle that search begins with an information need which is articulated in some form of query. What follows below is the first in a mini-series of articles exploring the process of query formulation, starting with the most ubiquitous of design elements: the search box.

1. The search box

One of the fundamental concepts in HCI is notion of affordance: the idea that objects should behave in the manner that their appearance suggests. A push plate on a door affords pushing; a handle afford pulling. How many times have you walked up to a door and found it behaved contrary to your expectations? Invariably this is caused by a mismatch between form and function.

Likewise, the design of the search box should follow its function. If its purpose is to allow the user to enter queries in the form of keywords, then it should look like it will accept textual input, and have an associated button which clearly indicates its function. It should also be wide enough to comfortably accommodate the majority of queries:

A match between form and function at eBags.com

The examples below, by contrast, are perhaps somewhat less effective:

Fresh duck spit, roasted

A bit of a diversion here… but couldn’t help laughing when I read the entry for a certain hotel in the printed version of the Pride of Britain Hotels directory earlier today. I’ll spare them the embarrassment of naming them, but if you look closely you’ll find one that serves an English speciality known as “local duck spit roasted on an open fire”. Yum! Tastes much better without the hyphen, I think you’ll agree.

And while we’re on a general Eats, Shoots & Leaves theme, since when did “likely” become an adverb? Continued use of this word in such a manner will ‘likely’ annoy me. Sadly, proliferation of this grammatical monstrosity makes truly depressing viewing (according to Google ngrams):

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 31,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Related Posts:

1. It’s Tony, as in ‘P-e-t-e’
2. No Social Media please, we’re Ergonomists
3. Welcome to Information Interaction

A Task-based Model of Search

A little while ago I posted an article called Findability is just So Last Year, in which I argued that the current focus (dare I say fixation) of the search community on findability was somewhat limiting, and that in my experience (of enterprise search, at least), there are a great many other types of information-seeking behaviour that aren’t adequately accommodated by the ‘search as findability’ model. I’m talking here about things like analysis, sensemaking, and other problem-solving oriented behaviours.

Now, I’m not the first person to have made this observation (and I doubt I’ll be the last), but it occurs to me that one of the reasons the debate exists in the first place is that the community lacks a shared vocabulary for defining these concepts, and when we each talk about “search tasks” we may actually be referring to quite different things. So to clarify how I see the landscape, I’ve put together the short piece below. More importantly, I’ve tried to connect the conceptual (aka academic) material to current design practice, so that we can see what difference it might make if we had a shared perspective on these things. As always, comments & feedback welcome.

Patterns of Personalization

I’ve been thinking recently about the role of ‘advanced search’, i.e. the practice whereby some sites withhold certain aspects of functionality from ‘standard’ search and accommodate them instead within a separate search experience. Now, there’s a longer story to the rationale and value in doing this (which I’ll cover in a subsequent post), but it reminded me of the following presentation which addresses the issues of audience segmentation and personalization more generally. In particular, it describes an attempt to develop a framework for understanding the various types of personalization seen online and define them in terms of their fundamental characteristics.

To test it we applied it to a few notable instances to see where they would fit. The outcome revealed personalization types that could exist in theory, but don’t in practice – which of course starts you wondering why. I should point out that the ‘research’ behind this was relatively modest, so it’s by no means the final word, but it’s interesting food for thought (until I get round to writing a proper piece on ‘advanced search’

Related Posts:

1. From Search to Icon Design: a grammar for visual communication
2. A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search
3. Design Patterns for Spatial Information Visualisation and Analytics Applications
4. User Interface Design Patterns for Search & Information Discovery
5. Search UI Design Patterns

It’s Tony, as in ‘P-e-t-e’

Looks like the appetite for changing ownership has really taken root at Endeca. Casually perusing one of my old blog posts on Search Facets, I was amazed to see the byline spelled ‘P-e-t-e B-e-l-l’. Now, I’ve seen some weird auto-corrections in my time, but that’s quite some typo. You just can’t trust those spell checkers, can you.

Related Posts:

1. The Dimensions of Search User Experience
2. Findability is just So Last Year
3. Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at Search Solutions 2011)
4. A Taxonomy of Search Strategies and their Design Implications
5. Interaction Models for Faceted Search

No Social Media please, we’re Ergonomists

One of the great things about membership of the IEHF (Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors) is the support it provides for professionalism in the workplace, backed up by a strong sense of tradition underpinning the academic roots of the discipline. But perhaps one of its weaker points is our communal readiness to embrace new ways of working and communicating, particularly regarding social media and other online networking tools (e.g. blogs, wikis, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). There seems to be a perception (among the wider UX community, at least) that the IEHF is somewhat backward looking in this respect, with one ex-member describing it as “another association that’s extremely old school and slooooooooooow”. Reading some of these comments, you’d think that the average IEHF member couldn’t tell their RSS from their elbow. But is this really true? Is the footprint of the IEHF across social media really that shallow, or do we in fact have a small army of nascent bloggers and tweeters? I raised the issue recently on the LinkedIn IEHF forum, and this brief article summarises the response.

Search Solutions 2011: Highlights and Reflections

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of co-chairing the 5^th Search Solutions conference, held at BCS London in Covent Garden. As in previous years we had an eclectic mix of presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval. But new for this year was the tutorial programme: a selection of practical training courses reflecting current topics and state-of-the-art methods in search and information retrieval.

In hindsight, I can confide that this was something of a gamble: the idea of a tutorial programme came to our attention very late, and we had no idea whether we’d attract sufficient attendees (particularly given the modest size of the event compared to, say, ECIR or CIKM). However, in the end both tutorials were fully booked; a strong signal that we should consider a similar arrangement next year (perhaps even with a more extensive programme, e.g. four tutorials rather than two).

So, onto the event itself. Various folks have written summaries of the whole event (e.g. Charlie Hull’s), so I’ll just pick out a few highlights here.

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search (slideshow)

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting a paper at Enterprise Search Europe on a Taxonomy of Enterprise Search. This was the first time that the Enterprise Search Summit had found its way this side of the Atlantic, and I’m pleased to say it was a great success (due in no small part to the efforts the conference chair, Martin White).

The paper was essentially a research-driven piece, reporting on some empirical work into studying the search strategies and tactics that users commonly employ across a range of enterprise search contexts. As such, it mirrors Andrei Broder’s classic 2002 paper (A Taxonomy of Web Search), which addresses a broadly similar goal within the domain of web search. However, we used a more qualitative, user-oriented data source, and also extended the analysis to present some initial implications into how the findings could be applied in the design of search and discovery experiences.

After the event, Martin confided in me how unusual it would be to see such a paper at the New York event, intimating that there would be little room in the program for such a piece. That conversation and a subsequent exchange with Daniel Tunkelang at the CIKM Industry Event got me thinking: is the search industry playing its part in building an effective dialogue between researchers and practitioners? Could it do more? Is the job of disseminating and promoting the benefits and outcomes of IR research purely the responsibility of academics and researchers?

I hope to explore this issue further in a subsequent post. For now, here are the slides from the event. The associated paper is also available in a previous post and as a pdf from the HCIR conference website.

Related Posts:

1. A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery
2. Findability is just So Last Year
3. Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at Search Solutions 2011)
4. A Taxonomy of Search Strategies and their Design Implications 
5. Search Solutions 2011: London, November 16

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery

The conference season is indeed in full swing: two weeks ago we had HCIR in California and last week we had Enterprise Search Europe in London closely followed by the Industry Day at CIKM in Glasgow. So much to report back on! I wasn’t able to attend HCIR in person this year (it’s a long way to go for one day), but ex-Endeca colleagues Joe Lamantia, Mark Burrell and I had a poster accepted, which is included as part of the proceedings. The paper describes a revised version of the study we presented at EuroHCIR 2011, updated following very useful feedback from the reviewers (there’s actually a longer story to that which I’ll cover in a future post).

I’ve included the paper below in its entirety. It’s also available in pdf form from the HCIR website.

ABSTRACT

Classic IR (information retrieval) is predicated on the notion of users searching for information in order to satisfy a particular “information need”. However, it is now accepted that much of what we recognize as search behaviour is often not informational per se. Broder (2002) has shown that the need underlying a given web search could in fact be navigational (e.g. to find a particular site) or transactional (e.g. through online shopping, social media, etc.). Similarly, Rose & Levinson (2004) have identified the consumption of online resources as a further common category of search behaviour.

In this paper, we extend this work to the enterprise context, examining the needs and behaviours of individuals across a range of search and discovery scenarios within various types of enterprise. We present an initial taxonomy of “discovery modes”, and discuss some initial implications for the design of more effective search and discovery platforms and tools.