Search strategies considered harmful
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:
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 […]
Tabs, facets and views: getting the interaction right
As the dominant interaction paradigm used throughout the world of eCommerce, faceted search provides a framework that supports the exploration and selection among thousands – if not millions – of diverse items. But sometimes faceted search needs to be combined with other types of UI control to provide alternative ways to view and organise content. […]
New Book: Designing the Search Experience
Remember the Yahoo! Directory? It was a hand-built taxonomy that allowed users to browse and discover Internet resources. By categorizing sites by topic and location, it became the definitive map of the World Wide Web. But at the turn of the millennium, Yahoo! transformed itself from a directory into a search engine. The task of […]
Where am I? Techniques for wayfinding and navigation in faceted search
Faceted search enables users to intuitively explore complex information spaces by progressively refining their choices in each dimension. When combined with keyword search, this approach becomes incredibly powerful: so much so that faceted search is now the dominant interaction paradigm for most eCommerce sites and is being applied to an increasingly diverse range of search and […]
Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (pt 3)
Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming the search experience. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery-oriented problem solving. But how do we extend such a framework to accommodate not just dozens of facet values, […]
Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (pt 2)
1. Introduction In our last post we looked at some of the fundamental issues in designing faceted search such as layout (e.g. where to place the faceted navigation menus) and state (e.g. whether they should be open or closed by default). In this post, we continue the mini-series with a review of the various formats […]
Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (Pt 1)
Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming search experiences. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple lookup and fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery scenarios. In this article, we begin with a look at some of the fundamental design considerations such […]
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