Tag Archives: web site search

Do You Know Something I Don’t? The Art of Benchmarking Enterprise Search

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During the autumn we have been trying to keep our customers and others up to date with the search world by hosting breakfast seminars. By benchmarking enterprise search and sharing experiences and discussing with others the participants have taken giant leaps in understanding what search can deliver in true value. The same goes for sharing experiences between companies, where you often find yourself struggling with the same problems, regardless of business or company size.

We have been discussing how enterprise search can help intranets, extranets, web sites and support centers to capitalize on their knowledge. Some of the things that have been discussed in regards to benchmarking enterprise search.

Business Cases

  • How can search help companies save 100 million SEK/year?
  • How do you count return on investment (ROI) for search?

Search Functionality

How and why should you work with:

  • Key Matches to promote certain content (similar to Google’s sponsored links on the web)
  • Synonyms (to make sure that the end-users language corresponds to the corporate without having to change the information)
  • Query completion and suggestion to give the user an overview of what other people have been searching for when they start to type (similar to Apples web site search).

End User Experience

  • How can different interfaces serve different information needs and user-groups?
  • How does your user interface serve your end-users?

Information Quality

  • Do taxonomies and folksonomies help us find information faster?
  • Can search be used to improve the quality of your content?

During the spring we will continue to hold seminars, keeping you up-to date. If you’re not on our mailing list, please look at our Findability Events and register for our events.

During Wednesday and Thursday this week we will be attending a Ability conference to discuss search. Hope to see you there!

Designing a Good Search Experience – Summer Reading

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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!