Tyler Tate
Information Wayfinding, Part 3: Designing for Wayfinding
How can we make ever-growing volumes of information accessible and useful to people without overwhelming them? That is the question I want to consider in this third and final instalment on information wayfinding. In Part 1, I argued that we must move beyond thinking of information interaction as a book of pages, and instead think […]
Information Wayfinding, Pt 2: Elements of the Information Environment
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that vestiges of the pre-Web, print era still haunt digital experiences. To create information environments that are truly coherent, we must view them not as books full of pages, but as spaces to navigate and explore—much like finding our way through a city or a museum. This is […]
Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world—both physical […]
The Future of Information
Web pages are dead. The future of information—and how people interact with it—is undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Our eulogy must begin long before web pages were conceived. Before the Internet, there was the written word; the book was the preeminent artefact for disseminating and assimilating information. The Scroll and the Table of Contents In their early […]
Design Principles for Mobile Search
Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Android Design Guidelines both provide valuable guidance for designing general mobile applications. But there are a number of design principles that can help us achieve effective mobile search experiences in particular. Namely, most mobile search applications should prioritize content over controls, provide answers over results, and ensure cross-channel continuity.
Book Review: Search Analytics for Your Site
Search Analytics for Your Site, L. Rosenfeld. ISBN: 1-933820-20-9 (paper) and 1-933820-04-7 (digital) Financial services company The Vanguard Group had just purchased a shiny new search engine to improve search for their 12,000 employees. There was only one problem: the search results were worse than what they had before. John Ferrara, an information architect who […]
The Information Needs of Mobile Searchers
We live in a post-desktop era. In the UK alone, 45% of Internet users used a mobile phone to connect to the Internet in 2011 [7], and Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2014 there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop Internet users globally [6]. Not only are more people connecting with mobile devices, […]
The Three Circles of Collaborative Search
Search often appears personal, introspective, and private; an activity of the individual in isolation. In fact, most researchers depict search as a single-user activity. Yet a 2008 survey found that over half of respondents self-reported having co-operated with other people to search the web, while an impressive 97.1% went on to indicate at least one […]
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