This is a great topic. I've done a couple of different systems for eDiscovery - systems that are used by lawyers and paralegals to sift through the millions of documents and emails that need to be coded for any big litigation project.
One thing I discovered when doing user research is that a Google type approach wasn't going to work in this environment. In doing document reviews, you have to be 100% certain you've a) looked at all the documents and b) a set of documents is complete. So just showing the best matches first didn't really excite anyone; some poor (but well paid) person has to read through each one. Like the original poster, I found that the majority of users were pretty good at boolean searches, having had prior experience with Lexis/Nexis. But they still wanted a fast way to find a specific document. Here's a link to a screenshot of the search interface: http://www.xerox-xls.com/ss-search.php One thing I think worked well is that a text representation of the search was constructed below the form, which users found helpful in understanding where parentheses were going and what would be retrieved. Another useful concept is to let users do a search within a search (use a result set of one search as the starting point of a new search). Lastly, for novice users, sometimes letting them do a series of simple searches and then letting them combine or exclude results from the sets lets them do fairly powerful searches without having to formulate one big complex query. For example: Cars costing < $30,000 = result set A Car type is hybrid = result set B Car brand is not Toyota = result set C In set A + B + C = result set D The National Library of Medicine used to have a public Medline search called PubMed that used that approach. It was a bit slow, but pretty simple. Like I said, it's a great topic. Michael Moore -- Michael B. Moore • Pure InfoDesign • 415.246.6690 M • www.pureinfodesign.com ________________________________________________________________ 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
