Designing search: models and metaphors
It’s often said that search is a conversation: a dialog between two participants that can be every bit as rich as human conversation. On one side is the user, with an information need articulated in the form of a query, and on the other side is the system, with its response in the form of […]
My first attendance at Search Solutions
As a PhD student just reaching the end of my first year at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey, I was delighted to receive a postgraduate bursary from the British Computer Society IRSG to support my attendance at Search Solutions 2015. Search Solutions was an ideal opportunity […]
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. […]
Interaction Models for Faceted Search
Introduction 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 scenarios. But there is one design aspect of faceted search that is particuarly hard to get right: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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