Design Principles for Enterprise Search – The Philosophy of UX

Posted on July 15, 2011 by

In May I attended An Event Apart in Boston (AEA). AEA is a 2-day (design) conference for people who working with websites and was created by the father of web design Jeffrey Zeldman and the CSS guru Eric Meyer. The conference has a broad perspective, dealing with everything from how to write CSS3 and HTML5 to content strategy and graphic design. This post is about an AEA topic brought up by Whitney Hess: Create design principles and use them to establish a philosophy for the user experience.

Hess wants to create universal principals for user experience to communicate a shared understanding amongst team members and customers and to create a basis for an objective evaluation. The principles suggested by Hess are listed below along with examples of how these can relate to search and search user interfaces.

Stay out of people’s way

When you do know what people want stay out of their way

Google knows what to do when people visit their search at Google.com. They get out of the way and make it easy to get things done. The point is not to disturb users with information they do not need, including everything from modal popup windows or to many settings.

Create a hierarchy that matches people’s needs

Give crucial elements the greatest prominence

This means that the most used information should be easy to find and use. A classic example is that on most university webpages – it is almost impossible to find contact details to faculty members or campus address but very easy to find a statement of the school philosophy. But the former is probably what users mostly will try to find.

Limit distractions

This principle means that you should design for consecutive tasks and limit related information to the information you know would help the user with her current task. Don’t include related information in a search user interface just because you can if the information does not add value.

Provide strong information scent

There should be enough information in search results for users to decide if results are relevant. In an e-commerce site this would be the difference between selling and not selling. A search result will not be perceived as cluttered if the correct data is shown.

Provide signposts and cues

Always make it clear how to start a new search, how to apply filters and what kind of actions can be applied to specific search results.

Provide context

Let the user know that there are different kinds of search result. Display thumbnails for pictures and videos or show msn availability in people search.

Use constraints appropriately

Prevent errors before they happen. Query suggestion is a good way as it helps users correct spelling error before they happen. This saves time and frustration for the user.

Make actions reversible

Make it obvious how to removes filters or reset other settings.

Provide feedback

Interaction is a conversation so let the user know when something happens or when the search interface fetches new search results. Never let the user guess what happens.

Make a good first impression

You only have one time to make a first impression. It is therefore important to spend time designing the first impression of any interface. Always aim to make the experience for new users better. This could mean voluntary tutorials or fun and good-looking welcome messages.

So now what?

Are universal principles enough? Probably not. Every project and company is different and need their own principles to identify with. Hess ended her presentation with tips on how to create company principles to complement the universal principles. Maybe there will be future blog posts about creating your own design principles.

So what are your company’s principles?

Evaluate Your Search Application

Posted on July 2, 2010 by

Search is the worst usability problem on the web according to Peter Morville (in his book Search Patterns). With that in mind it is good to know that there are best practices and search patterns that one can follow to ensure that your search will work. Yet, just applying best practices and patterns will not always do the trick for you. Patterns are examples of good things that often work but they do not come with a guarantee that your users will understand and use search simply because you used best practice solutions.

There is no real substitute for testing your designs, whether it’s on websites intranets or any other type of application. Evaluating your design you will learn what works and does not work with your users. Search is a bit tricky when it comes to testing since there is not one single way or flow for the users to take to their goal. You need to account for multiple courses of actions. But that is also the beauty of it, you learn how very different paths users take when searching for the same information. And it does not have to be expensive to do the testing even if it is a bit tricky. There are several ways you can test your designs:

Test your ideas using pen and paper
Let a small group of users into your development or test environment to evaluate ideas under development
Create a computer prototype that is limited to the functionality you are evaluating
You can also evaluate the existing site before starting new development to identify what things need improvement
Your search logs are another valuable source of information regarding your users behaviors. Have a look at them as a complement.

And the best part of testing your ideas with users is, as a bonus you will learn even more stuff about your users that will be valuable to you in the future. Even if you are evaluating the smallest part of your website you will learn things that affects the experience of the overall site. So what are you waiting for? Start testing your site as well. I promise you will learn a lot from it. If you have any questions about how to best evaluate the search functionality on your site or intranet, write a comment here or drop me an email. In the meanwhile we will soon go on summer holiday. But we’ll be back again in August. Have a nice summer everyone!

Combining Search and Browse – Integrated Faceted Breadcrumbs

Posted on April 16, 2010 by

Finding information can be tricky and as I have written about in one of my previous posts improving findability is not about providing a single entrypoint to information. Users have different ways of finding information (browsing, searching and asking). They often combine these techniques with each other (berrypicking) and so they all need to be supported. Peter Morville states that.

“Browse and Search work best in tandem… the best finding interfaces achieve a balance, letting users move fluidly between browsing and searching.”

A lot of sites are improving their search experience through the implementation of faceted search. However, very few successfully integrate faceted search and browsing on their site. Searching and browsing are treated as two separate flows of interaction instead of trying to combine them which would provide the users with a much better experience.

That is why I was glad to learn about an idea from Greg Nudelman which he presented in his session at the IASummit which I attended last week. In his session Greg introduced his idea about Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb. According to him breadcrumbs are intuitive, flexible and resourceful and they are design elements that don’t cause problems but simply work. To test his idea he conducted usability tests on a prototype using the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb. According to his evaluation the integrated faceted breadcrumb has a lot of advantages over other faceted solutions:

Combine hierarchical Location & Attribute breadcrumbs
Use Change instead of Set-Remove-Set
Automatically retain relevant query information
Label breadcrumb aspects
Make it clear how to start a new search
Allow direct keyword manipulation.

I find this idea interesting and I am currently thinking about whether it could be applied into one of my own projects. (According to Greg it has not been implemented anywhere yet even though the findings from the usability testing were positive.) However I wonder if this is a concept that works well only for sites with relatively homogeneous content or if it would also work on larger collections of sites such as intranets? Can it be used in an intuitive way with a large number of facets and can it cope with the use of more complex filtering functionalities? For some sites it might not be the best idea to keep the search settings when the user changes search terms. These are some things I would like to find out. What do you think about this? Could you apply it to your site(s)? I recommend that you have a look at Greg Nudelman’s presentation on slideshare and find out for yourself. You can also find an article about the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb on Boxes and Arrows. I look forward to a discussion about whether this is any good so write me a comment here at the findability blog or find me on twitter.

Search and Accessibility

Posted on March 19, 2010 by

Västra Götalands regionen has introduced a new search solution that Findwise created together with Netrelations. Where both search and accessibility is important. We have also blogged about it earlier (see How to create better search – VGR leads the way). One important part of the creation of this solution was to create an interface that is accessible to everyone.

Today the web offers access to information and interaction for people around the world. But many sites today have barriers that make it difficult, and sometimes even impossible for people with different disabilities to navigate and interact with the site. It is important to design for accessibility – so that no one is excluded because of their disabilities.

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact and contribute to the Web. But web accessibility is not only for people that use screen readers, as is often portrayed. It is also for people with just poor eyesight who need to increase the text size or for people with cognitive disabilities (or sometimes even for those without disabilities). Web accessibility can benefit people without disabilities, such as when using a slow Internet connection, using a mobile phone to access the web or when someone is having a broken arm. Even such a thing as using a web browser without javascript because of company policy can be a disability on the web and should be considered when designing websites.

So how do you build accessible websites?

One of the easiest things is to make sure that the xhtml validates. This means that the code is correct, adheres to the latest standard from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and that the code is semantically correct i.e. that the different parts of the website use the correct html ”tags” and in the correct context. For example that the most important heading of a page is marked up with ”h1” and that the second most important is ”h2” (among other things important when making websites accessible for people using screen readers).

It is also important that a site can easily be navigated only by keyboard, so that people who cannot use a mouse still can access the site. Here it is important to test in which order the different elements of the web page is selected when using the keyboard to navigate through the page. One thing that is often overlooked is that a site often is inaccessible for people with cognitive disabilities because the site contains content that uses complex words, sentences or structure. By making content less complex and more structured it will be readable for everyone.

Examples from VGR

In the search application at VGR elements in the interface that use javascript will only be shown if the user has a browser with java script enabled. This will remove any situations where elements do not do anything because java script is turned off. The interface will still be usable, but you will not get all functionality. The VGR search solution also works well with only the keyboard, and there is a handy link that takes the user directly to the results. This way the user can skip unwanted information and navigation.

How is accessibility related to findability?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274260576/in/set-72157623208480316/

Search and Accessibility

Accessibility is important for findability because it is about making search solutions accessible and usable for everyone. The need to find information is not less important if you are blind, if you have a broken arm or if you have dyslexia. If you cannot use a search interface you cannot find the information you need.

“what you find changes who you become” -Peter Morville

In his book Search Patterns Peter Morville visualizes this in the ”user experience honeycomb”. As can been seen in the picture accessibility is as much a part of the user experience as usability or findability is and a search solution will be less usable without any of them.

Customer Service Powered by Search Technology

Posted on October 20, 2008 by

I was on the train, on my way to Copenhagen and UX intensive a four day seminar hosted by Adaptive Path. Looking forward to this week I was also contemplating the past year and the projects we’ve been working on. I recently finished a project at a customer service organization at a large company. The objective was to see if the agents (employees) helping customers could benefit from having a search platform. Would the search engine help the users in finding the right content to help their customers?

Our point was off course that it would, but it was up to us to prove it. And we did. The usages tests showed results better than I would have dared to hope for.

All users found it to be easier to search for information than browsing for it.
Searching helped the users not only in finding information faster, but finding information they didn’t know where to find or didn’t even know existed.
All users preferred using the search functionality instead of navigation for information.
The search functionality helped new employees learn the information they needed to know in order to help the customers, hence they were productive faster.Less time was spent asking for help from colleagues and support since users found the information they needed by searching for it.

These results are all very positive, but the most overwhelming thing for me in this project was the level of engagement from the users. They really enjoyed being a part of the evaluations, bringing feedback to the project team. They felt that they were a part of the process and this made them very positive to the change this project meant.

Change is often a hard thing in development projects. Even if the change is better for the end users of the system, the change in itself can still be problematic making people hostile to the idea, even though it is improving their situation. Involving users not only helps in creating a good product, but also in creating a good spirit around the project. I have experienced this in other projects as well. By setting up reference groups for the development process we have not only managed to get good feedback to the project but have also created a buzz about what’s happening. People are volunteering for being participants in our reference groups. This buzz spreads and creates a positive feeling about the change the project is bringing. Instead of dreading the users are welcoming the change. It’s user research at its best.

So the next time you are asking yourself why you should involve users in your project and not only business stakeholders – think about how not only the end product, but the project and the process as a whole, could benefit from this.

A Strategic Approach to Search

Posted on June 23, 2008 by

The other week I attended ”From business to buttons” a yearly conference about usability and ‘designing for effect’ held in Malmö. Maria from Findwise was there to talk about ‘search driven design – or why can’t or intranet be more like Google?’, while I had the privilege to walk around talking to attendees about search.

The conference gathered people from a broad range of industries such as telecom, banking, retail etc, but what struck me the most was that no matter how different their business was, their challenges when it came to Enterprise Search where like peas in a pod. The employees just want to find the information they need to do their job in an efficient way. Preferably by typing a simple keyword and get accurate results in a Google-stylish way. Many companies have made investments in Enterprise Search platforms, hoping that this will magically increase findability.

Back at the office I got hold of a new study on Findability, made by Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM). The survey shows that out of 500 businesses 49% of survey respondents “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. Furthermore the study suggests that “the fault does not lie with technology solution providers; rather, most organizations have failed to take a strategic approach to enterprise search: 49% of respondents report having “No Formal Goal” for enterprise Findability within their organizations”.

When looking at current Findwise customers one realizes that the success stories are all based on the same objective reason: the strategic approach, which has been focusing their business and end-users, looking at the technological investment as an enabler rather than a solution. The research paper from AIIM will be presented in a webinar on June 26:th, which I believe can be interesting. However, apart from establishing the fact that your company is facing the same challenges as everyone else, feel free to ask us how other companies have been using a strategic approach within this area; so you can use that knowledge to enhance your own solution.

Importance of Interaction Design

Posted on April 8, 2008 by

Lately I’ve been working in a couple of projects involving big companies which has given me a lot of new experience and knowledge. One of the things I’ve realized is how important it is to have a good interaction design and how that is not always the case.

The common thing in these projects have been that the customer has already started a new IT project. As time comes to implement the search functionality, they contact us. Thus, involvement from our side is after the interaction design has been made.

Since the customers are big companies, the interaction design has been made by external consultants who usually have a long going relationship with our customer, but don’t have a great knowledge about search. When the implementation starts, we’ve discovered that the interaction design is not perfect in terms of giving the end users a great search experience. This is due to lack of knowledge about search technology and what can be made with it. Using my knowledge in the search area I can propose changes in functionality that will give a better user experience. These changes of course requires new interaction design, but since the interaction design consultants has finished their assignment, the interaction design decisions needs to be worked out by our company.

In the worst case scenario this means that the complete interaction design needs to be redone from scratch. This will not be popular for the customer which needs to pay for the same thing twice. However since we at Findwise are search experts with lots of experience from past project and dedicated people working with interaction design we know how to create a good interaction design for search.

In the end this means that the customer is happy with the end result, but hiring us to also do the interaction design would have resulted in less cost for the customer!

Basic Enterprise Search is a Commodity – Let’s Go Further! Trends for 2008

Posted on December 31, 2007 by

So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008? Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon a commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.

As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors.

BI and search is one example, search within Rich Media (video, speech and music) another. The largest vendors are looking at new ways to develop and enrich their search capabilities and acquisitions of, or cooperation with, other companies is most likely to continue.

The next trend for 2008 is something that I personally look forward to: the user revolution
Enterprise search has for a long time been focusing on technical aspects, such as ability to scale, linguistics features etc. The predicted new era uses enterprise search as a tool based on user needs. At Findwise we have rapidly become clear of this since the need for our usability expert is great. Her work focuses on the end-user, and how the technical platforms can be used to support his or her everyday work. My believe is that this perspective will bridge the gap between IT and business, making enterprise search a tool to enable information retrieval and access in new ways.

What is your opinion? Are there more things to add for the future of enterprise search the following year?

Findwise wish you all a Happy New Year and look forward hearing from you in 2008!

How Many Users Can You Afford to Annoy?

Posted on September 12, 2007 by

The second keynote at the Human Computer Interaction conference in Lancaster was given by Jared Spool who talked about Breaking through the invisible walls of usability research. Jared is a very inspiring and entertaining speaker. If you have the chance to listen to him, take it!

One of the things he talked about was the fact that the usability techniques that are widely used today were in fact not designed for large amounts of users. We have all kinds of data about the users’ behaviors online, but can we really use that data in a productive way? As Jared said;

“there is a big difference between data and information, we don’t know what inferences to make from the data we have.”

He also gave examples from a couple of large american ecommerce sites that have millions of users every day. With traditional usability measures you, according to Jacob Nielsens report, can identify 80% of the usability problems with as few as five users. But if you have one million customers, then you could say that 200.000 of the customers would be annoyed. Imagine how much money’s worth of lost revenue 200.000 users is. So how many nines to we need? (90, 99, 99,999?) How many percent is enough? It is apparent that we need to find methods that can solve these problems with usability evalutations and testing.

Jared Spool visualizes how few users actually spend money on an ecommerce site, and how few users the company relies on for their revenue.

Jared also talked about the consequences that web 2.0 have had for web applications and communities. He talked about what things that make people want to use “extra functionality”, as for example review functionality; what things delight people. Things that are excitement generators today soon come to be expected in every application. And when, as Jared said, HCI becomes HHHHHCI; when social networks are widely used, things that delight us or aggravate us, spread very fast. So instead of thinking about the five user rule, think about this next time you plan a release of a new product or application: How many users can you afford to annoy?

The Usability of Navigators

Posted on June 11, 2007 by

Recently there has been some discussion about the usability of navigators , also known as facets, for search results and about faceted navigation through metadata. It is said that navigation through clustered categories is often unintuitive for the user.

Since the categories are created with every search query and usually are disorderly groupings that consist of only a few words they can be hard to understand. Predefined categories are better that way because they can be created as longer sentences explaining their content. They are also easy to organize into understandable hierachies.

But on the downside, with predefined categories, everything that is indexed in the search engine needs to be provided with metadata for applying the categories to the data. So what to do? Which is the way to satisfied users? Flexible but sometimes unintuitive categories or unflexible categories that are easily understood but more complex to index?

My thought is that it depends one the type of data as well as your users. If you have well defined, structured data that may already be structured into taxonomies it is easy for you to apply the categories to the structure. But if the data is unstructured it takes a lot less work to create and organize the categories for every query. It’ s basically a matter of costs.

If your users are computer literate and used to search engines as well as the domain at hand, the concept of navigators will come easy to them. But if they’re not used to computers it will be harder. Most users are familiar with navigating by clicking, so they could easily learn to click through the predefined categories, navigating their way to the desired search result. As long as they feel they are on the right track, users are also willing to navigate deep into hierarchical structures.

So which is the way to go? My answer is: Know your users as well as your content. That is the way to creating succesful navigation as well as good user experiences.

The Findability blog

the enterprise search and findability blog by Tietoevry Findwise

Tag Archives: usability