By Vegard Sandvold on February 24, 2010
flickr.com/adamcrowe
From UIE Brain Sparks: When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn’t happen, the team pays the price. We’ve all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the same course.
Tamara Adlin has developed a great technique to make that alignment happen, which she calls Ad Hoc Personas. Her method, borrowed from research-based personas, creates characters out of information the organization already has at their fingertips. They’re inexpensive and easy to create, ensuring a customer focus from the very start of the project. This remix of tweets from “The Power of Ad-Hoc Personas”, a UIE virtual seminar by Tamara herself, tells you how.
Continue reading “Remixing The Power of Ad-Hoc Personas”
By Vegard Sandvold on February 2, 2010
http://xkcd.com/125/
Everybody knows that you should ask open and unbiased questions when interviewing users for UX research. The real skill to master for the seasoned researcher/designer is not so much that, but to know what kind of open question to ask, and when to ask them. Some questions may prove to be dead ends, and other may explode in a frenzy of possible follow-up questions. The best questions are intended to reveal information unsaid and undiscovered. But how do you know what’s missing from the interview? What have you not been told so far, and how do you probe into that? This remix of tweets from “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets”, a UIE virtual seminar by Steve Portigal, gives you some of the answers.
Continue reading “Remixing Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets”
By Vegard Sandvold on January 7, 2010
When I started this blog a year ago, I set myself some mighty ambitious goals. I dreamt of writing 2-3 blog posts a week, to have 1000+ subscriber by this time, to arrange a small search user experience conference here in Oslo (!), and to write a short e-book.
Now – a year later, I have written 26 blog posts (2 per month), there are 164 comments (roughly 1:6 post/comment ratio), I got 153 RSS subscribers, 61 followers on Twitter, and I started writing the e-book. Conference… forget about it 
I say it’s a modest success, and it makes me happy. Happy to share my passion with you, but not complacent. I intend to continue blogging about search user experience, in my own slow pace. Why – because I love it! I love to write down my thoughts (helps me remember), and I love the conversations it sparks with you – the engaged and enlightened reader.
Hoping to make this blog even more useful for you, I did a small redesign over the holidays. I’ve added a more prominent Twitter feed (still working on it), and the footer now contains fresh RSS feeds for other great sites about search & user experience. I hope you find something you like there, in addition to future blog posts coming from yours truly.
Here are my blogger’s New Years resolutions:
- Tweet more – I hope to fill @thingsontop with useful links to search & UX related articles, for your pleasure.
- Upload a few presentations to SlideShare.
- Keep writing in-depth articles on search user experience – the fastest growing quiz sensation on the Interwebz.
Thank you all for sharing this experience with me!
Cheers,
Vegard
By Vegard Sandvold on December 15, 2009
flickr.com/roxycraft
At the heart of every great enterprise search user experience lies a clear and concise information architecture. Why – because search without structure is nothing but a disheartening solitary struggle to make sense of chaos. In order to implement a successful and sustainable search information architecture, you need to identify and design around relevant information entities, categories and facets. Categories in particular have a special role to play in the forming of search information architecture, one which reaches far into the following concept development and interaction design.
Why am I so geared-up about categories? I believe that design transcends technology, and that a well-designed (and possibly low-tech) enterprise search provides a better return on investment for businesses aiming to provide employees or customers with the best possible information access. And dividing by categories is one of the most effective ways to design coherent and noise-free search results, addressing problems that can’t be solved with relevancy alone.
Continue reading “I Love Search Information Architecture”
By Vegard Sandvold on October 12, 2009
Facets for used car classifieds like I would design them.
Facet design may seem like a trivial task at first. After all, it’s just a list of links representing a range of facet choices. By clicking on one choice after another users simply refine and narrow down the search results. Sort them by popularity (frequency) and show those neat hit counts on each facet choice, and you collect instant bonus points for improved usability and information scent. It’s not a lot more to it, right?
Continue reading “3 Quick Design Patterns for Better Faceted Search”
By Vegard Sandvold on August 24, 2009
flickr.com/kevinomara
Facets add value to the search user experience by helping users refine the usual ranked, best-first list of documents on a search page. The quality of faceted search, however, is at risk when search result precision is traded for recall. Users should ideally be able to find all documents relevant for a given query (high recall), and nothing other than these relevant documents (high precision). Balancing precision and recall is a constant challenge for enterprise search practitioners, since it’s notoriously difficult to achieve enough of both at the same time. When a trade-off has to be made, it may seem safer to err on the side of high recall. Then nothing of potential interest is left out, at least. But we shall see that high recall plays tricks with faceted search, forcing us to reconsider this assumption.
Continue reading “Mindless Recall Kills Faceted Search”
By Vegard Sandvold on August 14, 2009
flickr.com/jkim1
Okay, so the website is up, I started blogging, and I’m promoting my blog on Twitter, which again updates my Facebook status. I connect with interesting and like-minded people on LinkedIn, who all spend too much time online connecting with interesting and like-minded people on LinkedIn, just like I do. Now, in the interest of further self-promotion and personal development, what more can I do to increase my web presence?
I want to write an e-book about search user experience, based on some of my latest blog posts (and all the great discussions they have sparked). I started writing this summer, and that is partly why blogging has been a bit slow for me. I hope to get the e-book done in a few weeks time. Meanwhile, I would like to give you a little LOOK INSIDE! the text I have titled 4 Kinds of Search User Experience.
Continue reading “Writing a Book on Search User Experience”
By Vegard Sandvold on June 30, 2009
flickr.com/waisian
When working with search user experience, it’s often necessary to discover a suitable information strategy for an organization or business. An information strategy can potentially have a huge influence on how the search for information is facilitated. Are the users in question generally seeking precise answers to quick questions, or are they seeking to explore a broader selection of opportunities? Question answering will generally require a more ambitious use of technology, while exploration and discovery places greater focus on communicating with the users. Perhaps an early decision to acquire software with semantic analysis capabilities will lead the project towards greater use of technology, while users studies may reveal that users are keen on spending time researching the cheapest flights to their holiday destination. Understanding the integration of business goals, user needs, and technological possibilities is in any case vital for a successful and sustainable information strategy.
Continue reading “What Is Your Approach to Information Retrieval?”
By Vegard Sandvold on June 11, 2009
What is your name?
The hype has passed, and it’s clear that Wolfram Alpha isn’t the new Google killer as initially anticipated. But what is this new computational knowledge engine, and how shall we use it? It seems to me that we have been given some sort of a command line tool for a comprehensive information database. The search box acts as a peeking hole into Wolfram Alpha’s wonderful inner world of facts and figures, giving us a sense of what’s hidden inside there, while at the same time making everything slightly inaccessible. Like with a command line, you have to know what you’re asking for, and you must know how to phrase that question in a way Wolfram Alpha understands, in order to get a decent answer.
Continue reading “Wolfram Alpha – Re-Inventing the Command Line”
By Vegard Sandvold on May 11, 2009
flickr.com/allaboutgeorge
You’re the user experience designer hired in to give shape to a new enterprise search solution. Your client has already decided upon a technology vendor, and has purchased a license. The responsibility now rests with you to provide employees or customers with the best possible information access. Will you design the solution around the assumption that IR algorithms are able to directly deliver the relevant documents in response to most queries, without much further involvement from the user? Or will you design for optimal communication, making the user more responsible for retrieving relevant documents through engaging interaction? Since I don’t believe in technological silver bullets, I argue that good design takes you further for less money when you’re aiming for higher information accessibility.
Continue reading “Enterprise Search – Information Accessibility by Design or Technology?”
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