I’m pleased to report that our paper ‘Designing the Structured Search Experience: Rethinking the Query-Builder Paradigm‘ has finally come out in Weave: Journal of Library User Experience. It’s been a long time in the making, partly as Weave comes out only twice a year, but mostly as we wanted to include some key changes and updates from our latest work. What makes this paper different is that for the first time we’ve had the scope and mandate to explore the UX issues in some depth. Whereas in previous papers we’ve rather glossed over these things as ‘simply good design’ or ‘what UX practitioners are meant to just get on and do’, in this paper we took the opportunity to demonstrate how solving a challenge like this involves a level of nuance and complexity that may not be immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and moreover, that what you see in the deployed app is actually the culmination of significant design exploration and thinking – much of which ends up on the ‘cutting room floor’. Even just the algorithm for painting the iteratively nested containers (in alternating white/blue) was non-trivial, as you need to avoid edges where boxes meet at different level of nesting, i.e. resulting in a white on white or blue on blue boundary. Ironically tho, that bit of detail, interesting tho it is, didn’t make the final cut: you’ll have to wait for a subsequent blog post for that 🙂
Anyway, feedback so far has been very informative. Keep it coming in! New release coming soon, so happy to accommodate thoughts & suggestions. Abstract appended below.
