It's "me with another weird question" time... One of our applications has a very telephone book-like UI. I've suggested that searching in this application be enhanced to use Soundex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex) so that users will not have to know if someone in the database is "Alan Brown", "Allan Brown", "Allen Brown", etc.
The question I'm now trying to figure out is whether soundex should be used all the time or whether it should only be invoked if there is no exact match. For example, in our test data set the users "Alan Brown" and "Allan Brown" both appear - if someone searches for "Alan Brown" should he get one result or two? Both answers seem to confuse some subset of our test users, so I'm wondering if there has been any general research on the topic that might be relevant. Best regards, --Alan (one ell two a) ________________________________________________________________ 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
