search: the purest form of interaction design

Chiara [email protected]

Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction DesignUX Week 2007Wednesday, August 15

UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design

An IA Speaking on IxD?

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What’s So Hard About Search?

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Just Slap a Search Box On There

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There’s More To It Than That

• Understanding what happens behind the scenes will make us better designers.

• We need to know the limitations and restrictions ourselves, not take vendors’ or IT’s word for it.

• The end user must still come first.

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Search Affects Everyone

• Not just an IT problem.

• Not just an information architecture or findability problem.

• It’s also an interaction design problem.

• AND IT’S STILL NOT SOLVED!

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Search = Information Retrieval

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How Search Basically Works

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Searching

Indexing

Crawling

Content


Spider Crawls Content


Algorithm(s) Process & Build Index

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Index


Search Index to Retrieve Results

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Indexquery terms SearchResults

Set


So Really...

• All searches are database lookups

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Database Index


Okay, Not Really...

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Algorithms Are the Secret Sauce

• Natural language processing

• Pattern matching

• Full text search

• Page Rank

• Stemming

• and more...

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Page Rank Isn’t the (Only) Answer

• Page Rank says the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance.

• Most popular doesn’t automatically mean the most relevant.

• Really only works for web content. Intranets don’t link to content the way the blog-o-sphere does.

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We Need Basic Literacy

• As designers, we need to understand the basics of how these algorithms work.

• Gives us power when we go to IT. They don’t hold all the knowledge – it’s partnership.

• This stuff is hard – they aren’t going to offer to do more work for us unless we ask, and know what to ask for.

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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design 18

Enterprise Search Web Search

local search tool(s) 3rd party engines

customers or employees anyone

structured & unstructured unstructured content

control over content no content control

insight into user tasks hard to know tasks

tune engine for specific needs

tune engine for generic tasks


Enterprise Search Can Suck

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Can Also Allow for Refinement


It’s About Intention & Context

• When we know what people want to do, we are better able to give them the tools to do it.

• Easier to sniff out intention with a closed audience or within a narrow context.

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General Web Search Is Different

• Google, MSN and Yahoo! can’t know the context, intent or the user.

• Must try to be all things to all people.

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Where Can We Have Most Impact?

• On our own site searches.

• In vertical web searches.

• On our intranets.

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Search Experience Effects Site Use

• Interactions with the site search influences how you use the site.

• How can we make it so search is “quality time” for the user?

• “I won’t search on their support site because I get poor results.”

• “Why can’t it just work like Google?”

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Search Has Changed Our Behavior

• We don’t use encyclopedias anymore.

• “Google” is a verb that appears in prime time TV.

• 2-, 3- or 4-word phrases are used as queries in 72% of searches. 1-word queries account for only 13.5%.*

• Search is seen as an “escape hatch” when browsing navigation doesn’t work.

• We need to work with these changes.

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* According to European Web analytics provider OneStat in January 2007.


It’s How We Use the Tools We Have


We Aren’t Using What We Got

• We don’t need to throw out our current search engine for the latest Google Box.

• Looking at the user expereince of search and making changes there can drastically improve things.

• The algorithms are good at finding stuff - we need to be better about putting it in context.

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Search is About Choice

• It’s more than a tool to get stuff done or find things.

• It allows us to pick and choose out of all the information that is out there, the bits that are relevant to us, right now.

• It’s how we learn what is available.

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Focus on the Humans

• Search should change to support me, the user. I shouldn’t have to change to use search.

• The focus should be on the humans, not the machines. The machines are dumb.

• We are not using the machines for what they are best at.

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Search Engines Can’t Tell Intent

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blue suede shoes Search


Starting to See Web Search Change


The Future

• Search not for answers, but people.

• On the social web, will search become “word of mouth?”

• Visual search will be more & more important.

• Think of all the cool Web 2.0 applications and widgets that exist now. How will we search for them?

• The Semantic Web

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References to Learn More

• CMS Watch. The Enterprise Search Report. http://www.cmswatch.com/Search/Report/

• Search Tools website. http://www.searchtools.com/

• Search Engine Watch website. http://searchenginewatch.com/

• Baeza-Yates,Ricardo, Ribeiro-Neto, Berthier. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

• Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Penguin Group, 2005.

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Photo Credits - Thanks Flickr!

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/171659283/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/84178472@N00/416540994/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobydimitrov/492618684/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonaghita/469780760/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomattolson/187774538/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/book_slut/92868417/

• http://xkcd.com/155/

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Thank you!

Chiara Fox

[email protected]

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search: the purest form of interaction design

Technology

search index

search box

interaction design problem

index ux week

refinement ux week

genericneeds tasks ux

information retrieval

text search page rank