Designing faceted search (training course in London)

In case you missed it last time (since it filled up pretty quickly), there’s another chance to catch my full-day designing search tutorial in London on May 10. I’ll be presenting a full day course called Search Usability: Filters and Facets, which focuses on faceted search and provides deeper coverage of the key topics along with a variety of new practicals and group exercises.

For further details and registration, see the UKeIG website. In the meantime, I’ve appended further details below.

Hope to see you there!

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Who needs UX professionals anyway?

Most of us who work on digital products are familiar with the concept of A/B or multivariate testing – the process of exposing users to multiple variations of a design concept and using their aggregate behaviour to identify the optimal design, based on a predefined set of metrics. By gathering data across thousands of individual user sessions, multivariate testing can provide a rigorous evidence base for principled decision making. In principle, such data-centric, quantitative research techniques can be highly complementary to the more qualitative, user-centric research techniques typically associated with the UX profession.

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Search Usability: Filters & Facets

In case you missed it last time (since it filled up pretty quickly), there’s another chance to catch my full-day designing search tutorial in London on October 12. I’ll be presenting a full day course called Search Usability: Filters and Facets, which focuses on faceted search and provides deeper coverage of the key topics along with a variety of new practicals and group exercises.

For further details and registration, see the UKeIG website. In the meantime, I’ve appended further details below.

Hope to see you there!

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Designing Search: training course in London, May 25

In case you missed it last time (since it filled up pretty quickly), there’s another chance to catch my full-day designing search tutorial in London on May 25. I’ll be presenting a full day course called Search Usability: Filters and Facets, which focuses on faceted search and provides deeper coverage of the key topics along with a variety of new practicals and group exercises.

It’s also very competitively priced from just £180 per person – contrast that with a rate of ~£659 a day for this comparable offering!

For further details and registration, see the UKeIG website. In the meantime, I’ve appended further details below.

Hope to see you there!

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Search strategies considered harmful?

Regular readers of this blog will know that over the last few months I’ve been looking in detail at the process of search strategy formulation, i.e. the various ways in which professionals go about solving the problem of resolving complex information needs.

Some professions (e.g. recruitment professionals) employ complex search queries to address sourcing needs, generating queries such as this:

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Visualising how recruiters search

This week I’m pleased to present a guest post written by my colleague and researcher on the InnovateUK project Jon Chamberlain. Jon’s been doing some interesting work on analyzing Boolean strings and visualizing them using spider diagrams. Over to you Jon!

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Complex search strategies for systematic review

Last month I published a post describing our research into the use of complex search strategies in the workplace, and how we were undertaking a programme of quantitative research with respondents from a number of sectors. This work is progressing nicely, and we’re now moving on to the second part of this phase. This time we’re focusing on literature review, in particular systematic (or pragmatic) evidence review. This sector is especially interesting, as it addresses some of the most complex search problems of any profession, and involves a lengthy content production process whose output relies heavily on the quality of the initial search strategy.

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