Tag Archives: search experiences

Microsoft is betting on cloud, mobile and social for SharePoint 2013 – Impressions from the SharePoint Conference 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Over 10,000 attendees from 85 countries, more than 200 sponsors and exhibitors, and over 250 sessions. Besides these impressive numbers, the 2012 SharePoint conference in Las Vegas has also marked the launch of the new version of SharePoint. Findwise was there to learn and is now sharing with you the news about enterprise search in SharePoint 2013.

In the keynote presentation on the first day of the conference, Jared Spataro (Senior Director, SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft) mentions the three big bets made for the SharePoint 2013 product: CLOUD, MOBILE, and SOCIAL. This post tries to provide a brief overview of what these three buzzwords mean for the enterprise search solution in SharePoint 2013. Before reading this, also check out our previous post about search in SharePoint 2013 to get a taste of what’s new in search.

Search in the cloud

While you have probably heard the saying that “the cloud has altered the economics of computing” (Jared Spataro), you might be wondering how to get there. How to go from where you are now to the so-called cloud. The answer for search is that SharePoint 2013 provides a hybrid approach that helps out in this transition. Hybrid search promises to be the bridge between on-premises and the cloud.

The search results from the cloud and those from on-premise can be shown on the same page with the use of the “result blocks”. The result block, new to SharePoint 2013, is a block of results that are individually ranked and are grouped according to a “query rule”. In short, a query rule defines a condition and an action to be fired when the condition is met. With the use of the result blocks, you can display the search results for content coming from the cloud when searching from an on-premises site and the other way around (depending whether you want the search to be one-way or bidirectional), and you can also conditionally enable these result blocks depending on the query (for example, queries matching specific words or regular expressions).

hybridsearch

Screenshot from the post Hybrid search of the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog showing how results from the cloud are integrated in the search results page when the user searches from an on-premises SharePoint 2013 site.

Before making the decision to move to the cloud, it is wise to check the current features availability for both online and on-premise solutions on TechNet.

Mobile devices

With SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has added native mobile apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone, and iPad, and support across different mobile devices (TechNet), which provides access to information and people wherever the users are searching from.

Also important to mention when talking about mobile, is that the improved REST API widens the extensibility options and allows easy development of custom user experiences across different platforms and devices. The search REST API provides access to the keyword query language parameters, and combining this with a bit of JavaScript and HTML allows developers to quickly start building Apps with custom search experiences and making all information available across devices.

Social search

In the same keynote, Jared Spataro said that Microsoft has “integrated social very deeply into the product, creating new experiences that are really designed to help people collaborate more easily and help companies become more agile.” This was also conveyed by the presence of the two founders of the enterprise social network Yammer in the keynote presentation. The new social features integration means that the information about people following content, people following other people, tags, mentions, posts, discussions, are not only searchable but can be used in improving the relevance of the search results and improving the user experience overall. Also, many of the social features are driven by search, such as the recommendations for people or documents to follow.

Whether you are trying to find an answer to a problem to which the solution has already been posted by somebody else, or whether you are trying to find a person with the right expertise through the people search, SharePoint 2013 provides a more robust and richer social search experience than its previous versions. And the possibilities to extend the out-of-the-box capabilities must be very attractive to businesses that are for example looking to combine the social interactivity inside SharePoint with people data stored in other sources (CRM solutions, file shares, time tracking applications, etc).

Stay tuned!

It was indeed an awesome conference, well organized, but most of the times it was hard to decide which presentation to choose from the many good sessions running at the same time. Luckily (or wisely), we had more than one Findwizard on location!

This post is part of our series of reports from the SharePoint 2012 Conference. Keep an eye on the Findability blog for part two of our report from the biggest SharePoint conference of 2012!

Presentation: Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013

Posted on by
Reply

Presented by Paula Petcu and Ludvig Aldrin at Microsoft Campus Days, #cddk12, 31 October 2012, in Copenhagen Denmark.

Learn how easy it is to build powerful search experiences using SharePoint 2013.
The presentation will showcase the Search in SharePoint 2013 and provide a technical and functional walkthrough of what is new.  The presentation will take you through the out-of-box search experience, and you will get tips and tricks on how to extend the search platform to create a great custom experience for your users. Also discussed is the new search architecture and how search plays a central role in the new SharePoint 2013.

The presentation is divided into three parts. The first part will include an overview of search and will walk you through the out-of-the-box search experience, showcasing the new or improved functionalities and discussing how this affects the search experience. This part is all about finding what the users are looking for and getting answers to their questions. The new product revolves around the user more than ever, and you will be able to see this in the new search experience.

Then information about about the new search architecture, and this will make the transition to the second part of the presentation, which is all about extending. And a bit about executing queries under the new architecture and more specifically on how to extend the way they are executed.

Prior to SharePoint 2013, the only way to inspect and manipulate managed property values for items before being added to the search index was by extending the item processing pipeline in FAST Search for SharePoint. Clients using SharePoint search were out of luck as the functionality was not available to them. Now, MS has introduced three new items for content processing and enrichment: parsers, custom entity extractors, and web service callouts. These new features will be featured and one of the demoed.

But what happens next to the search engine? The third part of the presentation will be about the governance of your search solution. More specifically, it will focus on search analytics.

The Future of Information Discovery

Posted on by
Reply

I recently attended the third annual workshop on Human Computer Interaction and Information retrieval ( HCIR 2009) in Washington DC together with my colleague Lina. This is the first in a series of blog posts about what happened at the workshop. First up is the keynote about the Future of Information Discovery, by Ben Shneiderman.

Ben Shneiderman, professor at the University of Maryland and founding director of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory held the workshop keynote. He started off by talking about what he called the elephant in the room, Google. Because whenever you talk about search these days you have to talk about Google. Google has become the baseline for search and the system that users relate other search experiences to. Almost all of our customers’ users has in one way or another asked “why can’t our intranet be more like Google?” (Read more about expectations to Googlify the company in a previous blog post by Mickel. You can also download the slides to Ben Shneidermans keynote presentation.)

As Ben Shneiderman said, Google does actually do the job, finding facts work. However searching for information can be dangerous. Google does well on handling simple fact-finding tasks but we need better tools to handle other types of searches such as:

  • Extended fact finding tasks where the queries are often vague
  • Tasks involving exploration of availability where the requested results can be vague
  • Open ended browsing and problem analysis where there can be hidden assumptions
  • Mismatch between the users information needs and the available metadata which will require exhaustive searching.

One of the points that I appreciated the most in this keynote was that systems that support searching for information not only need to support simple known-item searches, which Google does well. They also need to support other things:

  • Helping users enrich query formulation
  • Expanding result management
  • Enable long-term effort
  • Enhance collaboration

I am especially pleased by this statement since these are some of the important issues that we are working with in our customer projects. You will also learn more about query formulation in one of our upcoming blog posts from HCIR.

Supporting these cases are important for supporting users in their information seeking tasks and, according to Shneiderman, this should also be done while enabling users to deal with specific cases of search, concerning:

  • Completeness – Do I have all the information on a specific topic? This is especially important in for example legal or medical cases.
  • Absence of information – proving non-existence of information is very difficult but needed when applying for a patent or registering a trademark.
  • Outliers – making unexpected connections between information and finding and learning new  things that you would not have expected to find.
  • Bridging – Connecting different disciplines with each other.

This is very important because when users search the goal is not the information itself. No users go to a search interface just for the fun of searching for information. They need the information for a purpose. Search therefore needs to support things such as decision-making, collaboration, innovation and societal improvement. Search will only be of true value to users when it not only searches the simple fact-finding tasks but when it helps users solve the real problems in the real world. And good tools can force people to reframe their thinking and see things in a different light. That is the kind of tools that we should be designing.

Designing a Good Search Experience – Summer Reading

Posted on by
Reply

The people at Findwise are entering vacation mode one after the other. While finishing up my projects before summer vacation I started thinking about what are the important parts of creating a good search experience. So I wanted to give you a few tips before leaving the office for the summer.

Myself and Caroline participated at Business to Buttons in Malmö in June. I met a lot of talented people and had lots of interesting conversations. One of the topics i ended up discussing the most was: Search is just search, right?

A very common opinion amongst designers is that search is just search. You put a search box in the upper right corner and then you’re done. The search engine has thought of everything else, hasn’t it? I found myself arguing about two things that are very close to my heart:

  • Choosing the righ search platform
  • Designing a good search experience

Choosing the right platform

There is a difference between search engine platforms. You just don’t go out and by one and think that’s it. “Search is fixed.” It does matter what platform you choose! Depending on your choice you can tune it in different ways to fit your needs. You don’t just install Google or any other platform for that matter, and think your done. If you do, you’re in trouble. As Caroline wrote about in a previous blogpost, most enterprise search projects with problems, have problems that are not related to the platform but to the fact that the organization does not have a strategic way of working with search.

To give you designers and other design interested people a quick start to this subject I recommend listening to a podcast from Adaptive Paths UX week 2007 where Chiara Fox talks about search and interaction design. (You can download the podcast from Itunes store for free.) It will introduce you to some of the basic things to think about when it comes to getting what you want from your search engine.

Designing a good search experience

When designing a good search experience there are lots of things you should think of. But without getting to involved in advanced filters, navigators, query suggestions and other things you first need to fix the basics. Showing relevant information in the search results. One of the most common problems I meet at new customers is search results lists that make it practically impossible for the users to understand what the result is without clicking on it. All search results look the same no matter if they’re documents, web pages, people, applications, or products. The only way for the user to understand what information they can find in the result is by clicking on it. A search application that forces the user to use pogosticking is in no way better than using poor navigation. So first you need to think about what information needs to be displayed about different types of search result. What information is relevant for a document, or for a web page?

To get you started thinking about this I recommend reading the articlefrom UIe about creating good search results. It will introduce you to some of the basics.The article describes web site search. Enterprise search is off course more complex since you have more types of sources but the basic idea is the same: Show the user the information they need.

So that was two recommendations for your reading list this summer (in case there is a rainy day or two).

If you have any question about choosing the right platform or design good search experiences please contact us. More on these topics will also come after the summer.

From the people here at Findwise, have a great vacation everyone!

Designing for Search at Business to Buttons

Posted on by
Reply

I read an interesting interview where Peter Morville interviewed Luke Wroblewski about Search Patterns. They mentioned some search patterns.

Query Refinement

Most users won’t refine pre-query. They don’t know the size and range of the index. But they will refine post-query, and it provides tremendous value.

Search Assistance

Studies show a correlation between the number of words in the query and satisfaction with results. Search Assist improves query richness. Tips (e.g., did you mean?) improve confidence and suggestions (e.g., related concepts) can shift users into exploratory mode.

Layout

For query refinement tools, we found the right rail is the least discoverable. The top is the most obvious, but suggestions can get in the way of results. That’s why search assist is on top but hidden by default. Other examples include Local and Shopping.

Vertical Search

In verticals such as News and Games, we’ve found that people are fine with two search boxes, one for the vertical and one for web search. In each vertical, we’re selectively exposing structured metadata (e.g., pricing in Autos) to support the decision making process.

It’s always nice when other companies corroborate our findings and experiences.

If you want to know more about these topics and about designing good search experiences come and listen to us talk at Business to Buttons in Malmö. There will be something for the expert as well as those new to search technology. You can also come and talk to us in our monter during the breaks. Hope to see you there!