Just a quick heads up that on Thursday 2nd May I’ll be presenting a tutorial at CHI 2013 in Paris called Designing Search Usability. This is part of a programme of training courses offered throughout the conference week, so there are lots more to choose from. Personally I wouldn’t mind attending the Speech-based Interaction course as well.
The course represents a wholesale revision of my original tutorial, updated to accommodate new concepts and exercises drawn from the book “Designing the Search Experience: the Information Architecture of Discovery”, published by Morgan Kaufmann in December 2012.
It’s also very competitively priced at just 20 euro per session (although it appears this rate is only available to conference attendees). For further details and registration, see the CHI 2013 website. In the meantime, I’ve appended further details below.
Hope to see you there!
Overview
Search is not just a box and ten blue links. Search is a journey: an exploration where what we encounter along the way changes what we seek. But in order to guide people along this journey, we must understand both the art and science of search usability.
This course will provide an introduction to the basic principles of search usability with a focus on holistic solutions that integrate information seeking theory with the user interface design practice. Participants will:
- Explore the fundamental concepts of human-centred design for information search and discovery
- Learn how to differentiate between various types of search behaviour: known-item, exploratory, lookup, learning, investigation, etc.
- Understand the dimensions of search user experience and how to apply them to different contexts
- Explore design patterns and other key resources and their role in solving practical design problems
The course will include both presentations and group work to enable delegates to analyse, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of search applications within their own organisation.
Instructor
Tony Russell-Rose is founder and director of UXLabs, a research and design consultancy specialising in complex search and information access applications. Before founding UXLabs he was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca UI Design Pattern Library, an online resource dedicated to best practice in the design of search and discovery experiences. Prior to this he was technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters he was R&D manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where he led a team developing next generation information access products and services. Earlier professional experience includes a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship at HP Labs working on speech interfaces for mobile devices, and a Short-term Research Fellowship at BT Labs working on intelligent agents for information retrieval.
His academic qualifications include a PhD in artificial intelligence, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. He has published some 50+ scientific papers on search, user experience and text analytics, and is co-author of “Designing the Search Experience: the Information Architecture of Discovery“, published by Elsevier in December 2012. He is currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group. He also holds the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London.
