Designing Effective Search and Discovery User Experiences

HCI 2009

On September 4th my Endeca colleague Mark Burrell & I are presenting a tutorial at HCI 2009 called “Designing Effective Search & Discovery User Experiences“. This half-day tutorial provides a  practical introduction to Human Centred Design for information search, access and discovery. We present a concise overview of the “Design for Discovery” framework and show how this can be applied to the design of search user interfaces. A key element of the tutorial is the opportunity to apply these skills  in a practical group exercise.

The cost for this tutorial is just £40, which by most people’s standards is extremely competitive. It certainly compares very favourably with the typical price for commercial user experience training courses, e.g. this one which costs £675 + VAT for 2 days, or this one which costs 425 + VAT for just one day (in fact, I used to teach the first of these two courses). Note that attendees not have to register for the main conference event, i.e. you can attend just the tutorials alone.

See the HCI 2009 conference website for further details. For convenience I’ve included the official blurb below.

Overview

This half-day tutorial provides a practical introduction to Human Centred Design for information search, access and discovery. We present a concise overview of the “Design for Discovery” framework and show how to apply this to the design of search user interfaces. A key element of the tutorial is the opportunity to apply these skills in a practical group exercise.

Benefits

Participants will learn:

• the fundamental concepts and principles of Design for Discovery
• how to differentiate between various types of search behaviour: known-item, exploratory, etc.
• models of human information-seeking behaviour, and how to apply interaction design principles based on those models
• an understanding of the key variables of user type, goal and mode of interaction, and how to apply these variables when designing for varying user contexts
• the role of design patterns, and how to apply Endeca UI design patterns and those of other pattern libraries in designing search user interfaces

Audience

Web designers, information architects, user experience architects, and HCI professionals and researchers interested in the designing more effective user interfaces for search and information access. No specialist skills or knowledge are required.

Instructors

Tony Russell-Rose is User Experience Manager at Endeca Technologies, an enterprise software company specialising in innovative solutions for information search and discovery. Before joining Endeca, Tony was founder and director of UXLabs, a user experience consultancy specialising in technology innovation and applied R&D. Prior to this he was R&D group manager at Canon Research Centre Europe and technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. He holds a PhD in HCI and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. Tony is also Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University London.

Mark Burrell is Worldwide Lead for User Experience at Endeca Technologies. He has over 25 years of professional experience, including 15 years focused on the evaluation, design, and adoption of interactive technology solutions (with special emphasis on applications that aim to support learning and discovery). Prior to joining Endeca, Mark built and led user experience teams at several leading product and service companies including serving as Sr. UX Manager for Microsoft’s Unified Communications product division and Global UX Lead for Sapient. Mark holds a PhD in Clinical psychology with concentrations in cognitive psychology and epistemology/philosophy of science.

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