Again, time for Will's 2 Cents and a Tequila shot. This time about Information Seeking/Information Retrieval behavior given that research has shown essentially 4 modes of information seeking:
*Known-item information seeking.** * In a known-item search, the user** - Knows what they want - Knows what words/keywords to use to describe it - May have a fairly good understanding of where to start - In addition, users may be happy with the first object/article they find (though not always) and the task may not change significantly during the process of finding the article (or member, for that matter). *Exploration* - In an exploratory task, users have some general idea of what they want to know. However, they may or may not know how to articulate it, and, if they can, may not yet know the right words to use. *Don't know what you need to know* - The key concept behind this mode is that people often don't know exactly what they need to know. They may think they need one thing but need another; or, they may be looking at a website without a specific goal in mind. *Re-finding* - This mode is relatively straightforward—people looking for things they have already seen. They may remember exactly where it is, remember what site it was on, or have little idea about where it was. But before moving forward, don't get trapped in the "Solution searching for a problem," trap by seeing a new interaction pattern– in this case displaying the search results overlayed on top of the originating page. If the user starts on Page A which has content and a search widget, what is the goal they are trying to achieve? This page is close, but I want to see what else is out there? Why not just navigate to a new page? Okay – I have a use case – but before going there, let's review that the basic steps in information seeking behavior according to Ben Schneiderman are: 1 Formulation 2 Action 3 Review 4 Refine 5 Repeat Now – if my Page A is not content, but actually a search results screen from search formulation:action 1, but I want to reformulate my query terms without losing the current results set – have that load somewhere else while I perform the "Review-Refine" actions in Page A, then this might make sense. Better implementation would allow the original query results to be viewable, refinable, etc… but still have the Page B results viewable as they can come in so that if the reformulated query is better, Page A results can be disgarded. I think the implementation of something like Amazon's A9 might be a better design pattern – with each pane as a vertical expandable/collapsible view. This Google implementation doesn't allow the multitasking of reviewing/refining/filtering on results set Page A while simultaneously checking on the quality of the query in Page B. But this goes down a bit of a rabbit hole because do people actually behave this way – or not. Well – not according to Patricia Bates in the great article about "berry-picking" where an information seeker's query is constantly shifting – but within a confined context – the user begins with a query, but continues down a path where they review results, refine query, pick up tidbits of new info, refine query, reviewing results, hopping and skipping down a crooked path but all within a narrow context. "In real-life searches in manual sources, end users may begin with just one feature of a broader topic, or just one relevant reference, and move through a variety of sources. Each new piece of information they encounter gives them new ideas and directions to follow and, consequently, a new conception of the query. At each stage they are not just modifying the search terms used in order to get a better match for a single query. Rather the query itself (as well as the search terms used) is continually shifting, in part or whole. This type of search is here called an *evolving search."* So with that addressed (partially) – how does the Google implementation increase user benefit in the information seeking process? I illustrated one use case where it could theoretically be useful – but that's hypothetical. Bates go on in the article to dig further into interface design considerations for improving user experience given this research – but nothing points to this solution actually maximizing utility of a user following one of the four basic modes of information seeking.Perhaps the best thing is if these examples were shown in a format like Jen Tidwell's design patterns , or the Yahoo design pattern library where the problem space is first defined, user expectations discussed, and then design pattern is shown - as opposed to this case where all we have is the "you could do it this way" :-) See also this stuff: *Ambiant Findability, * By Peter Morville, O'Reilly *THE DESIGN OF BROWSING AND BERRYPICKING TECHNIQUES FOR THE ONLINE SEARCH INTERFACE* by Marcia J. Bates *Information scent as a driver of Web behavior graphs. Proceedings of the Conference on Human factors in computing systems CHI '01 Association for Computing Machinery.* By Card, Stuart K., Peter Pirolli *Sorting out searching: a user-interface framework for text searches Communications of the ACM* Ben Shneiderman<http://portal.acm.org/results.cfm?query=author%3ABen%20Shneiderman&querydisp=author%3ABen%20Shneiderman&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=6785436&CFTOKEN=34245674>, Donald Byrd<http://portal.acm.org/results.cfm?query=author%3ADonald%20Byrd&querydisp=author%3ADonald%20Byrd&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=6785436&CFTOKEN=34245674>, W. Bruce Croft<http://portal.acm.org/results.cfm?query=author%3AW%2E%20Bruce%20Croft&querydisp=author%3AW%2E%20Bruce%20Croft&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=6785436&CFTOKEN=34245674> *A User-interface framework for text searches http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january97/retrieval/01shneiderman.html D-Lib Magazine * Ben Shneiderman, Donald Byrd, W. Bruce Croft <trimmed> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Jason Conness <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This may be somewhat to Dante's first point but I have designed a scenario > where a user is searching for favorite Celebreties, Programs, and > Channels. > The use case is not intended to take the user to a separate page to learn > more information. It is intended as a selection tool. Search > Select > > Search > Select. For this case I found it a great way to allow users to > quickly search for an item, find it, select it and never have to leave the > page. Much quicker than loading a new page only to have to have the user > click "back". > ________________________________________________________________ > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... 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