Posted in Metadata, Search, tagged 2Dsearch, professional search, search strategies, user requirements on May 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »
This is quite possibly my shortest ever blog post.
For our next release of 2Dsearch we are looking to provide support for a number of new databases, and we’d like your opinion.
Which of the following do you use most frequently? Please select up to 3 choices.
Posted in Information architecture, Search, tagged Enterprise search, Site Search, user requirements on March 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But occasionally, an opportunity comes along that represents a uniquely valuable proposition, with no expectation of anything in return (apart from your time and attention). One such opportunity is the Search Insights Report.
This document embodies the collective expertise of a group of eight search implementation specialists working in Europe and North America. The report is a response to those from analyst companies such as Gartner and Forrester which show little understanding of the world of enterprise, e-commerce and larger-scale web site search from an implementation perspective. The objective was to share vendor-independent experience that they have gathered in a wide range of projects over the last decade, and I am honoured to have been invited to offer my own views as a guest contributor.
Posted in Search, User experience, tagged expertise retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, search strategy, survey, user requirements, User research on December 17, 2015| 1 Comment »
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 we have now completed this study and a couple of weeks ago I presented the first set of results at Search Solutions 2015. It turns out so far that the search problems faced by ostensibly unrelated professions have much more in common than we’d anticipated, but the strategies for solving those problems rely on radically differing approaches and tools.
Anyway, here are my slides, focusing on one of the three professions we studied (spoiler alert: you’ll have to view the presentation to see which one!). As always, comments and feedback welcome.
Posted in Search, User experience, tagged human factors, Information Retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, user requirements, User research on September 8, 2015| 4 Comments »
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:
Posted in Search, User experience, tagged human factors, Information Retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, user requirements, User research on July 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »
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!
Posted in Search, User experience, tagged human factors, Information Retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, user requirements, User research on July 8, 2015| Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Search, User experience, tagged human factors, Information Retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, user requirements, User research on June 9, 2015| Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Metadata, Search, tagged human factors, Information Retrieval, Information seeking, search strategies, user requirements, User research on March 31, 2015| Leave a Comment »
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:
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:
Designing the Search Experience
Information Interaction 