Reflections on Faceted Search and Beyond

Last week I had the privilege of attending James Kalbach‘s course on Faceted Search & Beyond, held as part of Syntagm‘s UXFest (“like Oktoberfest, but without the beer… and it’s in February”). Yes, I’ll admit it… I was curious. After all, I’d been running a broadly similar tutorial for the last two years or so, covering the whole gamut of Designing the Search Experience but packed into one (intensive) half day session. How could James manage to spin out just the faceted search element to a whole day? This I had to see.

But I wasn’t disappointed. Like many complex design challenges, there is a fractal nature to them: beneath each major design decision (or principle) there is a myriad of smaller ones. And James very effectively surfaced the key ones in a lively, engaging, coherent style.

In particular, I liked the way he presented each section as a question, for example:

• Where should facets appear on the page?
• How should values be displayed?
• How do you see further values?
• How are values selected?
• How (and where) are selected facet values represented?

And so on.

Many of these are covered as separate posts his blog, but it was good to see them all drawn together in what became a very cohesive whole. He also made good use of the practical exercises. I know from experience that this can be very hard to get right, especially considering the wide range of backgrounds that courses such as this attract. If you make the exercises too focused on practical design skills some people will inevitably struggle (at least at first), but if you make them too abstract and conceptual and you lose the point of a face to face session and the co-learning experience it entails.

He also presented the material within the context of an overarching design process, i.e. framing it within the context of the typical stages, roles and tools applied in a commercial setting. Some of these mirrored to our own engagement models and processes within Endeca, but the places where they differed also provided interesting points for discussion. The course also benefited from numerous illustrations and examples – somewhat inevitably, dare I say it, drawn from a set characterised by Endeca implementations. James also did a commendable job of relating his material to the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature (something at which the UX practitioner community has not traditionally excelled).

If I was to be uncharitable and point out one potential limitation it was that the course had a slightly “tactical” emphasis, focusing on the detail of individual on-page design decisions when some consideration of the broader strategic issues and overall experience might have provided a more rounded treatment. But I’m being really picky there, and besides, that would have made it a different tutorial.

So well done James – it was an excellent course and I thoroughtly enjoyed hearing your independent view. Now, let me get back to that proposal for a full-day course on Designing the Search Experience … 🙂

Related Posts:

1. Tutorial on Designing the Search Experience
2. The Dimensions of Search User Experience
3. Design Patterns for Spatial Information Visualisation and Analytics Applications
4. Is search behaviour becoming more sophisticated?
5. The Changing Face of Search

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Is search behaviour becoming more sophisticated?

A few folks have pointed out that my recent post on “Changing terms for changing times Usability, HCI, UCD & more” (which examined how the usage of these terms has changed across several decades of publications in Google Books) omitted a consideration of the “demand side” and the frequency of these terms in the Google index. With that in mind, I just updated the original article. If you just want to see the additional material alone, then read on.

Now let’s try a different analysis. If Google Books represents the “supply” side, i.e. content creation, what is the corresponding picture from the “demand” side, i.e. the content consumption? For this we can use Google Trends, which allows us to see how often certain topics have been searched for on Google over time (and also how frequently these topics have appeared in Google News stories). Applying the same query to Google Trends produces the following result, with the y-axis showing the average worldwide traffic for all five terms normalised by the dominant term (usability), and the x-axis showing the time period for which data is available. Note that Google Trends flattens its queries to lower case, thus eliminating one of the noise sources mentioned above. But it clearly cannot differentiate between the different senses for each of the acronyms, and for that reason in this analysis I chose to express the queries in their full British English form:

Clearly, usability remains the dominant term throughout, followed by information architecture and human computer interaction. I don’t think we can conclude much more than that without being able to magnify the scale and properly address the noise issues outlined above.

However, there are two other interesting patterns in these results. First, notice that all queries appear to be declining monotonically throughout the time period. Why is this? I think the answer may lie in the interpretation of the y axis: note that this value is actually the proportion of queries, not their absolute value. So this may reflect a gradual sophistication of user search behaviour on the web, in that queries are becoming ever more diverse as new terms are introduced and average query length increases. This is no doubt facilitated by novel UI features such as Google Instant, which faciliate the expression of longer queries. In other words, although usage of each of the queries above may be growing in absolute terms, they are nonetheless decreasing as proportion of overall web traffic. Unless Google Trends discloses absolute values for search terms, we can never know for sure.

But the more interesting pattern is the spikes in the distribution of the term usability that seem to appear midway through the final quarter of each year. What is causing these? My own hypothesis was that this could be related to World Usability Day, which since 2005 has occurred annually on the second Thursday in November. Indeed, a closer examination of the trends for each individual year does indicate a strong correlation, which appears to be borne out by the topics covered in the news stories associated with each spike. If so, it is reassuring to know that initiatives such as this do indeed appear to be having a global effect(!)

As a final datum, we should of course consider how frequently the various terms appear in the Google index itself (i.e. across the Internet). Would the patterns from Google Books be reflected across the web in general? Querying Google with each term in turn returns the following results (in descending order):

• “usability”                                   About 21,100,000 results
• “human computer interaction”      About 2,180,000 results
• “information architecture”             About 1,850,000 results
• “user centred design”                      About 131,000 results
• “human centred design”                    About 61,800 results

So what can we conclude from the above? My own feeling is that it was a worthwhile exercise considering these additional terms, for the sake of completeness if nothing else. And the observations about sophistication of user search behaviour and the spikes due to promotional events such as World Usability Day are also interesting.

For further conclusions and the complete analysis, see the original article.

Related Posts:

1. Changing terms for changing times Usability, HCI, UCD & more
2. Ergonomics, Human Factors, User Experience: changing terms for changing times
3. Tutorial on Designing the Search Experience
4. The Dimensions of Search User Experience
5. User Interface Design Patterns for Search & Information Discovery

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