Post on 06-May-2015
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Chiara Foxchiara@adaptivepath.com
Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction DesignUX Week 2007Wednesday, August 15
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Just Slap a Search Box On There
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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
How Search Basically Works
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Searching
Indexing
Crawling
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Algorithm(s) Process & Build Index
?
Index
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Search Index to Retrieve Results
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Indexquery terms SearchResults
Set
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
So Really...
• All searches are database lookups
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Database Index
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Algorithms Are the Secret Sauce
• Natural language processing
• Pattern matching
• Full text search
• Page Rank
• Stemming
• and more...
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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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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
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Where Can We Have Most Impact?
• On our own site searches.
• In vertical web searches.
• On our intranets.
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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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.
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It’s How We Use the Tools We Have
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
Search Engines Can’t Tell Intent
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blue suede shoes Search
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Starting to See Web Search Change
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design
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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