christopher adorna — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:41 GMT

Perhaps one of my biggest quibbles with some of this is when IAs or designers focus on search as a stand alone solution or a closed-loop feature set for “finding information.” Search is but one key piece of a larger, findability strategy that users employ to meet any number of disparate needs. By diving into traditional IA/UX initiatives like content classification, search interfaces, feedback messaging, refinement/sorting tools, etc., I find that a large portion of what search really is can be completely missed.

I’d suggest that the following should be considered:

1) Determining where search fits in the set of archetypal users’ offline and online finding behaviors
2) Understanding the emotional, physical and cognitive contexts within which a user comes to a website to find information and how these factors may affect the perception of what search is and the expectation of what search will deliver
3) How search functionality is perceived as integrating with other on-site finding features like browsing or exploring functionality
4) How the website’s UX articulates or infers what sort of information can be found by using search

Insights from these threads of research should then inform a search model that can be tested and refined. Only then should the work of designing the UX and UI start.

Finally, one should also consider that information finding or search does not simply stop when a target is recognized among a list of distractors. Users must have an opportunity to “acquire” or “encode” the information for search to really be useful. As such, search results should empower users to be able to act on the information that they just spent some effort finding.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by christopher adorna