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Search usabilityMaking life easier
James Breeze, Chief Experience Officer, Breezable
Pty. Ltd.www.breezable.com
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'People' do the searching
• Search is about 'find'
– Understand what people want
– "Findability precedes usability, in the Alphabet and on the Web , you can't usewhat you can't find“ Morville, 2005
See links: http://www.findability.org/
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What do people search for?
• How do your customers/staff talk
– Ask and listen
• Find out– Google Zeitgeist
– Google Trends
See links: SearchEngineWatch
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Users’ search ‘mentalmodel’
• Care with enterprise search
• Expectations are set by
• Box and button on all pages• List
See links: Nielsen on mental models
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Information retrieval
• What are your users’ objectives?
– Informational
– Transactional
– Navigational
See links: A taxonomy of Web search
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Organisational context
• Consider people, organization, andtechnology
• Search starts ‘before’ people get toyour site or to their desk
• Are search habits changing the webdesign culture?
See links: Improving customer experience blog
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Search Usability
• Visibility
• Formulation
• Expression• Query Entry
• Result Interpretation
• Error Recovery
See links: Search implementation, Buy Nielsen’s 29 search tips - $60
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Search Usability
• Contextually defined tabs/links
• Natural language search
–Don't expose the Boolean logic– Correct spelling
• URL strategy and good snippet
– Virality– Optimisation
See links: Clean URLs
“Short words are best and
the old words when short are
best of all” Winston Churchill
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Don’t expose the logic!
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Eyetracking and searchhabits
• Don’t forget context and emotion!
• Findings
–Banner blindness = search listingblindness
– Top 5 rank, not top 10
– ‘Golden Triangle’
See links: Listings blindness
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Eyetracking and searchhabits
• Increased snippet length
– Better for informational
– Worse for transactional
• More attention on snippet than URL
• Users only scan four results per page
• Users look farther down the list fornavigational queries
See links: Research findings and PDF
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Eyetracking and searchhabits
• For content accessed vianavigational searches, URLs shouldbe placed above the descriptions
• No differences between old vs young/ inexperienced vs experienced
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Helping yourself
• References linked from .ppt - email [email protected]
• Other sites/blogs
– Search Engine Land
– What People Search For
– Ecommerce Search Report
– Search Tools For Websites and Intranets
– Copernic Desktop Search