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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How do recruiters search?

A little while ago I published a post describing an InnovateUK-funded project investigating the use of complex search strategies in the workplace, and how we were undertaking some qualitative research interviewing professionals from various sectors. I’m pleased to report that this work is progressing nicely, with some good outputs so far (which we are happy to share in due course). It turns out so far that the search problems faced by ostensibly unrelated professions actually have a lot more in common than we’d anticipated, even though the strategies for solving those problems rely on seemingly parochial approaches and proprietary tools.

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User requirements for complex search strategies

Does your profession involve the use of complex search strategies?

If so, we’d like to talk to you. UXLabs has recently begun an InnovateUK-funded project investigating the use of complex search strategies in the workplace, with the aim of producing requirements for the design of next generation search tools. As part of that we are doing some field research interviewing professionals from various sectors, such as:

• Recruitment
• Media monitoring and competitive intelligence
• Literature review (e.g. clinical/medical)
• Patent analysis and legal

Do you know of anyone from those sectors who could lend us a little of their time to discuss (and ideally demonstrate) the practical challenges that such professionals face in formulating complex search strategies? If so please get in touch with us at tgr AT uxlabs.co.uk. In return we’d be happy to share a pre-publication copy of any report we produce.

PS: Just in case you’re wondering, by ‘complex search strategies’ we mean either Boolean queries like this:

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Researcher / analyst needed

I am currently recruiting for the following position. We’d like to start asap, so if you know of anyone suitable, please do point in the direction of tgr AT uxlabs.co.uk. Thanks!

Researcher / analyst

UXLabs is seeking a researcher / analyst for a 4-6 month government-funded project investigating the commercial feasibility of a new approach to search query formulation. The project will involve a programme of qualitative research involving end users and stakeholders from a variety of target sectors. It will also include a competitive analysis of alternative approaches to complex query formulation. The results will be used to identify key user tasks and goals, quantify market opportunities, and drive product development.

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