UXLabs ‘Internships’ for 2016

Here’s a sample of some of the things we’re working on at UXLabs this year, neatly packaged into Masters level ‘internships’. I use quotes there as it’s a convenient term used by many of my academic colleagues, but these opportunities are (a) unpaid and (b) remote (i.e. hosted by your own institution). So perhaps ‘co-supervised MSc projects initiated by a commercial partner’ is more accurate term… Anyway, what we offer is support, expertise, supervision and access to real world data/challenges. If you are interested in working with us on the challenges below, get in touch.

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UXLabs ‘Internships’ for 2015

Here’s a sample of some of the things we’re working on at UXLabs this year, neatly packaged into Masters level ‘internships’. I use quotes there as although it’s a convenient term used by many of my academic colleagues, these opportunities are (a) unpaid and (b) remote (i.e. hosted by your own institution). So maybe ‘co-supervised MSc projects initiated by a commercial partner’ is more accurate term… Anyway, what we offer is support, expertise, co-supervision and access to real world data/challenges. If you are interested in working with us on the challenges below, get in touch.

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EuroHCIR 2014: lineup announced

I’m pleased to announce the line up for EuroHCIR 2014, which will be held at BCS London on September 13. This event is the fourth HCIR event to be held outside of the US, and as such represents a critical point in the development of the HCIR community in Europe. We’re just in the process of finalizing the programme, which will include 7 presentations, a keynote speaker and an evening social. We also hope to include an interactive group session in the afternoon – more on that later. In the meantime, I’ve appended the full list of accepted papers below. More details on the EuroHCIR website. Hope to see you there!

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EuroHCIR 2014 – deadline approaching!

Just a quick reminder that next Friday (1st August) is the deadline for submissions to EuroHCIR 2014, which I am co-organising with Max Wilson, Birger Larsen, Preben Hansen and Kristian Norling. This is the fourth year we’ve run the event, so we’re hoping for a good set of submissions to keep up momentum. As before, we’re accepting both research and practice-oriented papers, so if you have any queries (particularly about the latter) just drop me a line.

The event itself is on 13 September at BCS London, with a poster session/social scheduled for the evening before. I’ve appended a summary of the call for papers below, and further details can be found at the EuroHCIR 2014 website. Hope to see you there!

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Introduction to Information Architecture

The three circles of IA (www.theguardian.com)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve had the privilege of presenting various training courses around Europe over the last year or two, focusing primarily on the intersection between search and user experience. For 2014 I’m pleased to announce a new course offering: an Introduction to Information Architecture. This will be presented for the first time at the University of West London on February 26, and is a collaborative effort with Stephann Makri of City University. Our aim is to offer the best of both worlds: academic rigour backed up by the experience of working a wide variety of commercial projects, in a format that emphasises the use of group work and practical exercises.

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A language for search and discovery

Around this time last year I gave a talk at AMR 2012 on the topic of Understanding and Designing for Consumer Search Behaviour. Since then I’ve been working with colleagues Joe Lamantia and Stephann Makri on an overview paper that summarises the work and illustrates its application to a well-known social media platform. I’m pleased to say that this paper is now finally available as an extended blog post (below) and as a rather more convenient pdf. As always, comments & feedback welcome 🙂

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New year, New book

I’m guessing that by now most people may have seen this, but just in case – and for the record – here is the official announcement of the publication of Designing the Search Experience: the Information Architecture of Discovery. It’s the product of almost two years effort by Tyler and me, so we’re both relieved and elated to finally see it in print.

I’ve appended a brief summary below. If you’d like to see more – including a free sample chapter – check out the book website. If you’re interested in reviewing it, drop me a line.

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The Information Architecture of Discovery

Remember the Yahoo! Directory? It was a hand-built taxonomy that allowed users to browse and discover Internet resources. By categorizing sites by topic and location, it became the definitive map of the World Wide Web. But at the turn of the millennium, Yahoo! transformed itself from a directory into a search engine. The task of organising so many disparate items into a single coherent structure had simply become too overwhelming.

A decade later, this story is all too familiar. Online stores sell hundreds of thousands of items, social networks host millions of users, and Flickr hosts billions of photos. Navigation is no longer the future: search is the key to sense-making in the digital universe.

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Designing for Consumer Search Behaviour (slideshow)

Here are the slides from the talk I gave recently at HCIR 2012 on Designing for Consumer Search Behaviour. This presentation is the counterpart to the previous one: while A Model of Consumer Search Behaviour introduced the model and described the analytic work that led to it, this talk looks at the practical design implications. In particular, it addresses the observation that although the information retrieval community is blessed with an abundance of analytic models, only a tiny fraction of these make any impression at all on mainstream UX design practice.

Why is this? In part, this may be simply a reflection of imperfect channels of communication between the respective communities. However, I suspect it may also be a by-product of the way researchers are incentivized: with career progression based almost exclusively on citations in peer-reviewed academic journals, it is hard to see what motivation may be left to encourage adoption by other communities such as design practitioners. Yet from a wider perspective, it is precisely this cross-fertilisation that can make the difference between an idea gathering the dust of citations within a closed community and actually having an impact on the mainstream search experiences that we as consumers all encounter.

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A Model of Consumer Search Behaviour (slideshow)

Here are the slides from the talk I gave at EuroHCIR last week on A Model of Consumer Search Behaviour. This talk extends and validates the taxonomy of information search strategies (aka ‘search modes’) presented at last year’s event, but applies it in this instance to the domain of site search, i.e. consumer-oriented websites and search applications. We found that site search users presented significantly different information needs to those of enterprise search, implying some key differences in the information behaviours required to satisfy those needs.

As usual, some of the builds don’t come out quite right on Slideshare, but I can always make the ppt available if people want to see the original. I’ll post the full text of the paper itself here as well shortly (watch this space :))

 

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