Michael Gaigg: Über UI/UX Design

Implications of the Inability of Users to Search Effectively

Posted by Michael Gaigg

Jakob Nielsen outlines in his latest alertbox newsletter (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html) the inability of users to search effectively.

Findings

My colleague Neal Dinoff, Esri Usability Lab Manager, summarized the article and outlined Jakob Nielsen's core findings:

• People (even highly educated people) have remarkably poor search skills.
• Once they head down a keyword path, no matter how fruitless, they seldom change their search strategy
• Users will enter search terms into any open text field with no understanding of whether they are searching the whole site, the World Wide Web, or only a discreet section of the site.
• Users are overconfident in the reliability of results.
• Almost no one uses Advanced Search. When they do, they use it incorrectly.

Lessons

Neal continues to conclude lessons for our search design:

• Don't assume that advanced search will help your website; you might build such features, but people will use them only in exceptional cases.
• Spend the vast majority of your resources on improving regular search (simple search).
• Design for the way the world is, not the way we wish it were. This means accepting search dominance, and trying to help users with poor research skills.

Implications

I believe more implications can be deducted:

• Curate (make sense of) content (!!!):
• Aggregate (most relevant in one location)
• Distill (more simplistic)
• Elevate (identify and describe trends/insights)
• Mashup (create new points of view based on multiple sources)
• Every page is a potential landing page, so help user to:
• Locate themselves (titles)
• Provide context (the bigger picture)
• Find the content/functions they were originally looking for
• Navigate further (well thought-through navigation architecture + good links + meaningful footer links)
• Create pages so that they can be found through:
• Search Engine Optimization (metatags, headings, etc.)
• Write in the language of your users, that’s how they will search

What are your Experiences?