Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Making search work – critical success factors
- 1 Search must work
- 2 How search works
- 3 The search business
- 4 Making a business case for search
- 5 Specifying and selecting a search engine
- 6 Optimizing search performance
- 7 Search usability
- 8 Desktop search
- 9 Implementing web search
- 10 Implementing search for an intranet
- 11 Enterprise search
- 12 Multilingual search
- 13 Future directions
- Appendix Search software vendors
- Further reading
- Glossary
- Subject index
- Company index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Making search work – critical success factors
- 1 Search must work
- 2 How search works
- 3 The search business
- 4 Making a business case for search
- 5 Specifying and selecting a search engine
- 6 Optimizing search performance
- 7 Search usability
- 8 Desktop search
- 9 Implementing web search
- 10 Implementing search for an intranet
- 11 Enterprise search
- 12 Multilingual search
- 13 Future directions
- Appendix Search software vendors
- Further reading
- Glossary
- Subject index
- Company index
Summary
In this chapter:
■ The importance of search usability
■ Options for presenting search results
■ Three case studies of excellence in search usability
Supporting information discovery
Usability is a measure of the ease with which someone can make use of a system to undertake specific tasks. Over the last few years there has been a very significant increase in the level of interest in usability as organizations strive to get the best returns out of their investment in websites.
Among the elements of usability are:
■ Functionally correct – the system allows the user to undertake the task
■ Efficient to use – the time and/or number of clicks that are taken to perform the task
■ Easy to learn – the task requires only a few clicks and advice is provided (or is available) to assist the process
■ Easy to remember – the system does not tax the human memory
■ Error tolerant – the user is never left at a dead end and there are routines that track problems as they arise and enable designers to take remedial action
■ Subjectively pleasing – users want to use the system because of the overall ‘feel’ of the site and the way in which it reacts to their requirements.
Although there is a vast literature on usability testing there is very little advice on usability issues regarding search. Even the normally invaluable Useit website from Jakob Nielsen has only a few comments on search among the several hundred other entries. Probably the best general resource on the design of search pages is the much-expanded chapter on search in the third edition of Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and Jenifer Tidwell's book on designing interfaces is also a valuable resource.
Search in particular has to be a dialogue, because of the need for the search engine to assist the visitor/user to determine what they already know and then how they wish to proceed with the next stage of the search. The page navigation on a site is more about presenting terms that the visitor/user will be familiar with as a starting point, and then supporting working down through some form of hierarchy to find the information required. This is, of course, a simplistic view of navigation versus search, and elsewhere in this book the point has been made that search and navigation must be complementary.
- Type
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- Information
- Making Search WorkImplementing web, intranet and enterprise search, pp. 75 - 88Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2007