YAY! I was hoping that I would be able to catch up to this conversation. For me, it is about control. In navigating to desired information, the IA or whomever constructed the site, controls the experience with the customer making step-by-step choices based on what the site chooses to make available. With search, the user "control" the experience, plugging their oftentimes ambiguous terms into a box and getting a list of seemingly appropriate results right back. Google further simplified this process by taking away a lot of the programmatic arcana (Boolean bugaboo that few were able to use effectively) and now the "Google experience" drive search UX.
All of that typed, Jared Spool will tell us (fingers crossed at my end) that customers are more successful if they navigate through the information space than if they trust the information seeking equivalent of crack cocaine usually found in the upper right corner of a site's masthead. I believe that this is because customers don't know what they don't know at the outset of their search. As the customer navigates through an information space, their information need become contextualized within that space and clearer enabling them to make more effective choices and ultimately resolve their need. That's the Disney ending at least. Web search used to work that way when Northern Lights and Alta Vista presented their cornucopias and folks would click around and make discoveries and figure out that maybe they were looking for the wrong thing or they gave up on expecting a machine to understand their need and asked a fellow thought processing biped (hopefully a reference librarian because they totally ROCK!). For me, serendipity is getting lucky with the I Feel Lucky button, using search engines to help me find something that I know is there (i.e. the IxDA website) and will include the search engine that takes my flailing around and makes sense of it by presenting results that it "thinks" I will be interested in based on what I've told it so far. I believe that this is closer than we might think. As far as I'm concerned, the only time search doesn't work is when we, the thought processing bipeds, do not avail ourselves of every opportunity presented to describe our content to the machine. Search is far from perfect. It is however extremely complex and robust and a terrific tool, not thoughtful and terrific nonetheless. As for its flaws? I believe that they lie..."Not in our stars but in ourselves." marianne [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bruce Esrig Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 2:04 AM To: stephanie .; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability There are fundamental reasons that search of publicly-available specific information works better than pre-built structure. Setting up site navigation involves choices: - Which items to make visible and when - What to call the items Search cuts across both of these: - If the searcher gives priority to a lower-level category, the search will match when step-by-step navigation would hit a hiccup - If the searcher chooses a different name from the architect, the content may match anyway The times when search does not win are: - When privileges are required to make items visible, and the search engine isn't granted the same privileges as the user - When multiple distinct items are called by the same name This first factor explains why search within an e-mail archive is a killer app. The search engine in your e-mail has your privileges, so anything you can get e-mailed to yourself is searchable. If you are able to distinguish among the items in your e-mail, then they become findable too. Regarding serendipity, there are three phases to search: - Specifying criteria (and later broadening them based on actual or anticipated search results) - Narrowing the criteria (based on actual search results) - Selecting an item from among the search results Perhaps what you are looking for is there, but in a different way than you expect. Is there not serendipity even in filtering? That combined with idiosyncratic links within content can give us the appropriate surprises that we crave. Best wishes, Bruce Esrig On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 5:58 PM, stephanie . <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry for joining in on this late but I'm wondering what you folks > think of eliminating browsable navigation on Web sites all together > and just forcing users to use a search interface to locate what they > are looking for. > Songza > (http://www.songza.com) is an example of this that does not allow > users to browse, for example, a category such as Rock music. > > I've always been of the mindset that we should provide for different > user habits but if the majority of users are moving towards search > only, then perhaps my assumption should be re-evaluated. It makes me a > bit sad to think that serendipity may be eventually lost. > > Any thoughts? > > > Stephanie Walker > Information Architect > Austin, TX, USA > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe > ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines > ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help > .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
