On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Peter Morville wrote:
I agree that large corporate (and .edu and .gov) websites should at
least
seriously consider migrating to a search-centered strategy.
I predict this will fail.
Browsing rarely scales well.
Nothing scales well, but I believe a well tuned IA is going to outplay
a search engine any day. Facets scale best, for many types of data.
Site search is increasingly a choice of first resort.
There is no evidence to support this.
It's a matter of the nature of the content. If people know unique
identifiers (exact titles, authors, part numbers), then search will
always trump any category hierarchy or facets. That's why media
products (such as books and music) do well with search.
However, search on data where the people don't have unique identifiers
(such as much of the content one might find on the Adobe.com site)
doesn't do well. Users enter generic keywords into search and the
results presentation is rarely helpful.
I'm going to bet that if David looks closely at Adobe.com's stats,
most of the users don't try search from the home page. If they try
search, it will be from somewhere deep in the site. This tells me that
they are using search to recover from a failure in IA. They couldn't
find what they were looking for by following trigger words, so they
resorted to Search (where, what they enter into the Search box is
their trigger words).
That's my take.
Jared
________________________________________________________________
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
