Vegard Sandvold
The True Value of Enterprise Search Technology
Technology has no inherent business value. Technology doesn’t provide improved findabiliy, decision-making or knowledge management by itself. Technology just provides features that help users perform tasks, thereby reaching their goals. Only when user goals and business goals align, can you hope to create business value. Without people, there is no purpose – and without purpose, [...]
The Essentials of Great Search Design (ECIR 2010)
Enterprise search is a wicked problem – a problem that can’t be solved merely with clever algorithms, beautiful code and lots of data. You need a proper process for search user experience design when dealing with high ambitions, diverging goals, and tight budgets and deadline – not to forget about potentially weak corporate IT infrastructure, [...]
Remixing The Power of Ad-Hoc Personas
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 [...]
Remixing Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets
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 [...]
Now (Hopefully) Even More Useful!
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 [...]
I Love Search Information Architecture
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 [...]
3 Quick Design Patterns for Better Faceted Search
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, [...]
Mindless Recall Kills Faceted Search
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 [...]
Writing a Book on Search User Experience
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 [...]
What Is Your Approach to Information Retrieval?
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 [...]
