Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us.

The same is true when clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve our needs and provide everything we’re seeking.

Unfortunately, much of the time, it doesn’t. The shame is it’s completely preventable—careful thought and design could’ve resulted in a delightful user experience.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from December 2009. I talk about some perils we’ve seen when users clicked on sponsored links, only to be disappointed by the results. Two years later our findings are still the same.

Read the article, Three Perils with Search Landing Pages.

How do you determine what ads to show when search is involved? Share your thoughts with
us below.

This is a sample of Lou Rosenfeld’s, Beyond User Research, from the 2011 IA Summit.

UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted as companies strive to produce better products and services for their users. But user research itself can be narrow in focus and full of biases. Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media, suggests that by breaking down the silos that exist between other research practices, we can create a complementary research experience. This will produce even better analysis and therefore, better products as a whole.

In an attempt to map out organizational structure, Lou offers a set of dichotomies. In terms of research, web analytics folks and UX professionals both bring important insights to the table. But they focus on different things. It’s this separation of insights that lead to the silo effect. Even though these insights would be completely complementary, the cross-pollination that would require this enhancement to the research often is not occurring.

It boils down to the differences in how people think. User experience people tend to shy away from quantitative data and take a more qualitative approach. Neither is a bad approach to take, but the differences between empathetical and analytical thinking, for instance, provide vastly different results.

By combining the efforts of these different practices we can arrive at tremendously useful insights. For example, Lou explains that by adding data to typical personas you can enrich them and enhance the design process. The personas may then align closer to the analytics data simply by adding what they would search for, resulting in a deeper understanding of your users.

Lou is presenting a UIE Virtual Seminar, 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap on November 3. There are new opportunities for Information Architects to add significant value to projects. There exist new metrics for measuring engagement with your site visitors. These measures will guide you towards design decisions that let your users find what they’re after. Learn more about Lou’s seminar.

This podcast was recorded at the 2011 IA Summit. For details about next year’s summit, visit IAsummit.org.

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Full Transcript.

Lou Rosenfeld: We have this fragmentation problem which I’ve already said things live in silos not just content but now insights that ought to help us figure out what to do with content and other design issues.

We’ve got differentiation. We don’t really understand what that CRM stuff is about. I’ve never seen one of those things before. Yet, I sense it might be good to look at if I’m doing any kind of design work.

And then most importantly this combinatorial issue, the synthesis of all those insights into something that approaches an organizational brain, an organizational or institutional way to make smart design decisions.

So that’s kind of what we’re facing. In my limited experience with this, I’ve tried to map it and I think a lot of us are pretty good at doing this sort of mapping of an organization and how it works. It’s almost like the same sort of urge that we use, that got us into doing things like site maps and wire frames.

I came up with a bunch of dichotomies. I couldn’t map it so let me run through some of these dichotomies. What I’m finding is, there’s a lot of people who are really good at figuring out what is going on and there’s a lot of other people often not the same that are really good at figuring out why those things are going on.

So for example, people draw on information that comes from analytics research, the quantitative data. They may learn something really interesting. But it’s all behavioral stuff. They don’t really know what was going on in a user’s head.

They can draw up and infer interesting hypothesis but they can’t test those hypothesis. That’s something that people who are really good at doing user studies for example like a lot of us, are really good at.

We, on the other hand, aren’t always so good at knowing the right questions to ask. And I’m kind of going to start focusing a bit on two areas of practice, web analytics and user research but these are the ones I know best.

This is really even more complex when you introduce all the other perspectives but let me just focus on these two. A lot of web analytics people can tell you what is going on. They can’t tell you why. A lot of us can tell you why things are the way they are but we don’t know what to test necessarily.

We don’t have the right questions to explore without the data to help us figure that out. There’s a whole kind of a breakdown between qualitative and quantitative people. I love this diagram with the two brains in there. I wish I had come up with it.

I’m not sure how well you can read it but numbers versus emotion, analysis versus empathy, the brain versus binky? Is that what it is? So you know, we have different ways of looking at problems, different ways we try to solve problems and we often are comfortable with different types of data or evidence to help us solve those problems or at least to help us understand what the problems might be.

So that’s a big breakdown. A lot of what I’m saying right now, I’m trying to make a point and by making that point, I’m going to over generalize quite a bit but I think a lot of us kind of would fall into one of these categories.

I don’t know that anyone is equally comfortable with qualitative and quantitative data. I’ve met very few people that seemed to be able to do that. In many cases, I think some of us make for qualitative studies because we’re really uncomfortable with quantitative data or vice versa. It’s just the nature of how our minds work and what we’re comfortable with.

A lot of us are in the business of making sure our organizations reached their goals. Web analytics people as an example, they express goals as KPI, things that are measurable, key performance indicators.

A lot of us in this room have been trained to think more on behalf of the user and what their goals are and how to identify them and make sure they’re using them. Sometimes those things are very easy to mesh together especially in commerce sites for example. Often, they’re not.

We have to resolve these things but we’re not always so good at it because usually, whoever is making the decision has a bias in one direction or the other. In effect they’re thinking with half a brain.

I think a lot of us are really good at measuring the world that we know. Certainly, again, on the analytics side, you start with your KPI based on metrics and you say, “I’m going to look at all that data and figure out whether we’re performing against the goals that we’ve set out for ourselves as an organization.

Are we doing well? Are we not doing well? Contrast that with looking at data for patterns, looking at data for things to emerge that were unexpected. That kind of emergent data analysis is really looking to learn about the world we don’t know and therefore we don’t know how to measure.

And then yet another, I’m sure there are more dichotomies. There’s a breakdown between the comfort level and understanding of statistical data versus descriptive data and you could have people who make very strong arguments, garbage in, garbage out in both cases and they’d both be right probably in both cases.

But that’s not how they see it. Usually, we have a bias toward one direction or another. We like one, we like the other, usually not both but they tell us very interesting, but different things that often fit together nicely, as we’ll see.

I’ve tried to, like I say here, reduce this to a very over generalized, over simplified set of dichotomies that I’ve just gone through. This is just a summary of what those are. And this is just for two areas. This is just for web analytics and user experience.

But if you look at these, I hope what you’re starting to see is not just the differences but the fact that they come together quite nicely, that they’re very complimentary. That’s where that’s where combinatorial effect that’s coming in where the insights that one has fit quite nicely with the insights of the other.

Now, I can’t map this. It’s just not in my wheelhouse but I bet some of you could. What I’m really hopeful for is that someone like Alex Osterwalder who wrote the Business Model Generation book. Is anyone familiar with it? Fantastic.

He actually created and published it with a bunch of people, created a whole new business model around publishing just to do one book. Amazing. But he did a whole bunch of mapping of essentially business models. It’s over simplified but damn it, it’s useful.

We need something like that to take all these types of insights and put them together in a way that would be really useful for us especially making design decisions. So without a map, why bother even trying?

You know, if we can’t map, this is really a hard problem, what’s the value of jumping in? Well, for one, we can really, really learn quite a bit from each other’s data, right? So let me give you an example.

This is one of my favorite things in the world. It’s a little bit of site search analytics code little snippet of stuff. All you really need to know is that if you look at it, the orange stuff like “vincense plate” is what was searched.

There are a few other things that you can maybe figure out, an IP address so you know who it is, the time-date stamps, you know when it happened. The zero next to the last bit of information is how many search results there were.

Now, look at another line. Same time, roughly two seconds later, same IP address. Now they’re searching license plate and I got, I think it’s 146 results. Interesting, what’s going on here? Maybe they spelled it right but well what happens next?

Oh, it’s a different user and they’re searching on a real mouthful. This is a state government site and this user was searching that site for Regional Transportation Governance Commission. People search things that long? They know what those things are even called? Do you know what government agencies are called?

As you’re looking through this, I bet you each one of you are already putting on your analysis hats and saying, “You know, obviously typos are an issue. How would I fix that problem? Maybe I would turn on the spell check on the search engine.”

Now did they get what they wanted when they were searching on the license plate or not? You don’t know. Is that a common thing that people search and what about this mouthful in the last line?

Basically, each one of us should probably have a whole bunch of different ways of looking at this data and we would start ferrying very different hypothesis, just a couple of examples.

I think a lot of people from, to over generalized analytics community, would be wondering things like are we converting on license plate renewals. A lot of other people like me would be saying, “What are people searching for the most? Is it license plate coming up a lot?”

If so, are we giving that information very easily, are we presenting it on the main page so they can renew their license plate easily and so forth. So we look at the same data, tiny little snippet of data and we probably are all starting to come up with different conclusions or at least different hypothesis and thinking about what we do next differently.

What the next action would be could be very different if you’re looking at this as an interaction designer versus an analytics person versus a content strategist. Another way we can really benefit each other is by helping improve each other’s design tools.

So I grabbed an Adaptive Path persona and you know again, I love site search analytics but there are lots of other types of analytics out there that you can do this with but I threw some site search analytics data in there.

So you got your typical persona stuff, right? And then, why don’t we add some data? Wouldn’t that enrich in a new way “what does Steven search?” Now I can actually go to my analytics people and say I could use some of that data.

In fact, maybe my personas might match up well with your audience segments. Maybe you can start putting these things together in some new and far more powerful ways. We can really help tell each other’s stories.

I love this example. Adaptive Path again, Jeff Veen and a team were working on a product to make analytics data more easy to understand. I think it’s called Measure Map. Is that right anyone? Measure Map.

Google liked it. In fact, Google basically bought Measure Map but they really bought the team. And they’d already purchased the analytics application that they were going to make into Google Analytics but they wanted that team to work on it, to help tell the story of the data in a way that maybe someone from the web analytics world wouldn’t have thought.

Searching on the web is a pretty simple task and most often gets us what we need. Yet when we add another channel into the equation, like going to the store for the product you’re researching, or reaching out to the call center with questions, the search experience can quickly turn poor, becoming frustrating and unproductive.

In today’s UIEtips, Pete Bell breaks down search into 2 basic types: fact finding and discovery. He discusses how these two methods of search affect users’ expectations and experiences and how multi-channels compound the issues. This article is an excerpt from Greg Nudelman’s new book, Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success.

Read Pete’s article: Search as a Multi-channel Experience.

Besides reading Pete’s article, you can learn more on how to improve search as a multi-channel experience at our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete on Thursday, April 28. And when you register for the webinar, you’ll get a copy of Greg Nudleman’s new book, Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce. Get the details about Pete’s webinar.

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How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site, and accomplish what they set out to do. Often times, it doesn’t work out that easily. How do you increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success? Shari Thurow offers techniques and tricks to satisfy the goals of your users.

Shari is the Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive. She has written two books, Search Engine Visibility and When Search Meets Web Usability, which is also the title of her Virtual Seminar. We ran out of time during the seminar to answer all of the questions. Today we are bringing you the follow up podcast with Shari and Jared Spool as they go over those questions.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…The problem with a home page is that a lot of website designers think that the purpose of the home page is to look pretty. The purpose of a home page is really to act as a table of contents to a website, focusing users on the areas of the site that are most important to you as a business owner and also helping them accomplish their desired tasks. Do they need to log in? You should supply a nice log in area.

We also find that, on the home page, there’s another area where people skip the big, honking graphic image. They’re looking for the text, because a home page is a means to an end. People don’t go to a home page and accomplish their task on a website on a home page. They’re actually trying to go to a product page, a service page, or an article page. That’s what they’re doing to accomplish their tasks. So, I think big, color photographs on the home page tend not to be a good design.

We found that the same photographs just scaled down with a little more text to get people to go to certain sections of the website actually performed better. A hundred percent of the users that we tested were able to complete the task. But, the one with the big, honking, graphic images, only 14 percent of the people completed their desired tasks…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Shari address these questions and more:

• Can you optimize Flash content?
• Is there a need to optimize for all search engines or to pick one specifically to optimize for?
• Are there any advantages to presenting headings as images with alternative text?
• Would repeating a call to action at the top and bottom of a page make search engine bots suspicious of spamming?

As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments. Please share in our comments section.

Join us today at 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, and 11am Pacific. (If you’re in Mountain Time, you’re definitely clever enough to figure out the pattern. Except for Arizona. Those folks mess me up every time.)

Point your browser at http://live.5by5.tv

That’s where you’ll find Peter and me.

There’s three ways you can put your questions to Peter. We’ll have an online chat room, where you can type in your question. (It’s IRC and a little nutty.)

You can also use Twitter. Just include #UIEBOOK in your tweet and we’ll see it.

But the best way is our dial-in lines. You can dial +1 407 278-4070 and talk directly to Peter and me. (If you get a busy signal, it means we’ve filled up all the available lines. Just watch the show and we’ll tell you when the lines are free again.)

If everything goes as planned, we’ll record both the video and audio of the session, so you can pass it on to your colleagues at work (or catch it if you can’t join us).

See you there!

Let’s talk about search!

Earlier this year, Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender gave us their comprehensive book, Search Patterns. If you work on a web site or intranet where you want your users to find and discover all the good stuff you’ve hidden within, you want to read this book.

And here’s your chance to not only read a great book, but to ask your questions of one of the authors. Peter Morville will join us on December 6 at 2pm ET for a live Q&A about the book, finding things, and designing for discovery.

Joining us is easy:

Sign up at our EventBrite page. (This way you’ll get the connection information and last minute reminders.)

If you don’t already own it, buy Peter & Jeffrey’s book, Search Patterns. (Amazon’s got it for great prices, especially on the Kindle.)

Read the book by December 6. (Don’t worry, it’s an easy and fascinating read, with lots of Jeffrey’s fun illustrations and examples.)

Join us on the 6th at 2pm ET for our discussion. Have a phone near you and you can dial in to the show to ask Peter your questions directly!
See you there.

Thanks to the good folks at Aquent for helping us make all this happen. (If you’re looking for top design talent with the perfect skills to match your project, you should definitely look to Aquent. And if you’re top talent, you want to check out what Aquent can do to help you find some awesome gigs. Learn more about Aquent. )

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SEO and User Experience shouldn’t be at odds with one another. That’s what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week’s SpoolCast with Jared Spool. Vanessa is the founder of Nine By Blue, author of Marketing in the Age of Google, and a former Googler herself. Tamara is the founder of adlin, inc, author of multiple books on personas, and a former customer experience leader at Amazon. Vanessa and Tamara are giving a full-day workshop on using business-driven personas to create holistic search and experience strategies at the User Interface 15 Conference. In this podcast, you’ll get a taste of what they’ve been working on.

When you make something usable, it naturally attracts search engines. That may fly in the face of some of the SEO talk you’ve heard. Vanessa tells us not to build your site with search algorithms in mind. Algorithms change. Instead you should build your site towards the aim of the search.

Tamara suggests building our sites around conversations with our users. That’s what the search engines reward. What problem does your product or service solve? Answer your customers’ questions on your site, and you’ll be found.

You need a holistic process across the silos.

A big stumbling block to this common sense approach to UX is corporate politics. People are naturally most concerned about their silo of the company. Tamara and Vanessa believe a good UX consultant will see the silo and ask everyone to step back and ask “What are the business goals”? It seems silly, but it’s effective. No UX or SEO will succeed without that clarity, says Tamara.

We’re thrilled to have Vanessa and Tamara give a full-day workshop on embracing SEO and UX through personas. We hope you’ll join us there. You can learn more about this topic and workshop in the podcast. Don’t forget to leave us your questions and comments here, below.

Explore Tamara and Vanessa’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by November 5 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

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Few people have thought about search, and all that it encompasses, like Mark Burrell. Mark’s the Worldwide Lead for User Experience at Endeca, the company that builds search applications for many of the sites you use every day. These guys know search, and Mark is tasked with making the search experience humane.

With his vast experience with search applications, he oversees the Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library, which attempts to catalog many of the most successful interface patterns for search. The goal is to make user and designer’s lives easier—and their searches more effective.

Which is exactly why we asked him to join Peter Morville for a UIE Virtual Seminar on Search and Discovery Patterns, back in January of this year. Today we’re revisiting the topic by sharing the follow up podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the seminar. Below are a few highlights from the podcast.

Much of the challenge in search lies in sorting through results in a meaningful way. There are a number of interface components that sites use to accomplish this, and one is the range slider. You may have seen them on sites like Kayak.com. But are these intuitive for the users? Mark says they can be, but the devil is in the details. Designing the search experience is complex and there aren’t simple answers. Used correctly, range sliders can be useful.

“Determine what information is critical for the people you’re designing for and make that salient.”
-Mark Burrell

One size doesn’t fit all. One question asked, should you use different patterns for different audiences? There is not just one right answer to this question, but you need to know your audience and their scenarios, Mark says. Different interfaces or patterns for different types of searchers can be an effective decision.

One example of this is with Intranets. Mark says there’s a surprising amount of overlap between design for Intranets and public-facing sites. But there are advantages to knowing your audience intimately, as with an Intranet. You can tune your search and interface for specific groups within your company. A great example is in searching for human resources information. An average employee searching for “insurance forms” might expect to get a list of the relevant forms for her to fill out.

But if this search comes from an HR employee, her scenario is almost certainly different. She might rather see recently updated forms or policy documents that pertain to the forms, instead of the forms themselves. Leveraging our existing knowledge of who is searching can lead to powerful modifications.

There is much more in the podcast, including a discussion of combining searching and browsing, the complexities of designing components that denote AND vs. OR searches, and the good and the bad with “type ahead” assisted search. Tune in, and then let us hear your questions and thoughts in the comments below.

Google comes to the rescue with their Quality Score. It’s an algorithm that ranks how relevant and persuasive the content is. The Quality Score will help designers produce a better site, while helping marketers get better search rankings. Become best friends with Google’s Quality Score and you’re sure to improve the relevance of your content and meet search metric goals.

Not many understand Google’s Quality Score. Plenty of you may not have even heard of it. For this week’s UIEtips article, we asked Jeffrey Eisenberg to explain how Google’s Quality Score works and why Google provides a financial incentive for paid searches that produce better user experiences. Jeffrey and his brother Bryan have helped numerous companies craft accountable digital marketing strategies that emphasize the optimization of customer experiences. I think you’ll learn a lot from this article.

Read the article, Google, User Experience, & Thinking Beyond Conversion.

We’re fortunate that Jeffrey and Bryan are also conducting our next virtual seminar, Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design and Marketing Meet. At the end of this Thursday’s (8/26) seminar, you’ll understand how to improve your Quality Score. They’ll share 7 perspectives to help you determine the relevance in your content. And they’ll give you 10 tips to improve your credibility, demonstrate value, and enhance the persuasiveness of your navigation.

Did you know about Google’s Quality Score? What have you done to improve your score? Share your thoughts with us below.

Regularly, we produce podcast interviews from UX experts as follow ups to their recent UIE Virtual Seminar. There’s never enough time to answer all the excellent questions from the attendees. So we record Q&A sessions with the presenters and share it with everyone (no need to attend the webinar to follow the podcast).

In today’s UIEtips, I interview two fascinating people, Peter Morville and Steve Portigal. Peter presented one of our most popular webinars, Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns for Great Online Experiences. In his follow-up podcast, Peter discusses how browsing doesn’t scale, as well as two popular patterns: best result first pattern and advanced search.

Listen to Peter Morville’s podcast.

Steve’s webinar, Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind, told us what you must do for an effective interview process (hint, listening is involved). In this podcast, Steve and I discuss various aspects of the interviewing process and share some entertaining stories.

Listen to Steve Portigal’s podcast.

There’s a slew of podcasts to explore on our web site. Subscribe to our RSS feed and have all the latest podcasts at your fingertips automatically.

We’d love to hear what you think about these podcasts. Share your feedback below.

Listening to her, I got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining that, when we use them as the headings and main navigation on the site, the search engines don’t know what to do.

Vanessa points out that nobody goes to Google and searches for “Products”. Instead they search for what they are looking for. But the heading and navigation links are critical to helping the search engine do what it needs to do.

Home pages, like at 3m.com, use generic words like “Products & Services” and “Our Company” for their links and headings.

So, her recommendation was to stop using words like Products, Solutions, and Clients and start using words that actually describe what you offer. This way the search engine would list you higher for those terms.

Interestingly, I’ve found the same when watching people use the web sites. Rarely, does someone say, “Hmmm. I wonder what products they have.” Even when they do, the menu (usually a simple drop down, but these days, a mega menu is common) lists the trademark names of the products, which, almost always, don’t actually say what the product does.

Sites like Progress.com use a mega menu for their products.

If you aren’t already familiar with the product offerings, how do you know where to click next? Sybase also offers a solutions tab. Again, these are buzzword-filled terms that are vague in what they actually mean. What is the difference between predictive analytics, high-performance business intelligence, and quantitative analytics? What do these terms actually mean? (Would we ever be in the market for low-performance business stupidity?)

Sybase.com‘s solution tab is riddled with buzzwords. How likely is it that anybody but dedicated customers and employees will know what this means?

So, once again, the parallels between what search engines needs for SEO and what users need from the design are striking. SEO strives to make it easy for the search engines to understand your content, so they can offer it to their searchers when that’s what the searcher is seeking. And what users need is an easy way to understand your content, so they can choose the right path through the site.

Coming up with terms for one will easily buy you terms for another. And it all comes down to providing great scent for both your users and for the search engine crawlers.

Update: Keith suggested Verizon Wireless’s site as a good example and I agree.

Verizon Wireless uses terms like Phones & Accessories instead of Products.

If you search on Phone & Accessories, their site appears in the top 10 organic listings. And, from a user perspective, the labels mean something more than Products.

Another Update: @OppDes tweeted that Gerry McGovern’s new article on Top Tasks versus Tiny Tasks gets to the core of this. I agree with that too.

The best search logs contain more than just keywords. They tell us what page the user searched from and, if we’re lucky, which result the user chose. This information—where the user came from and where the user went after, can tell a story that becomes helpful and insightful.

In this issue of UIEtips, I go back to an article we published in January of this year. I walk through some of the questions we answer when we’re studying a client’s search log. We’ve had great success with both public-facing sites and intranets, yielding an amazing list of substantial improvements to our clients’ designs. I’m sure you’ll find them beneficial too.

Read the article – Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log

Finding the issues is just the first step to getting to these types of improvements. You need to know how to fix them. Which is where Peter Morville and Mark Burrell come in.

On Wednesday, June 23, Lou Rosenfeld will do a deep dive with search logs when he delivers the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Site Search Analytics. Lou will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data to improve your users’ experience.

This is a must-attend seminar if you’re trying to get more from your site’s query data. Learn more about Lou’s Virtual Seminar.

Have you peered into your search log? We’d love to hear what you found. Join the discussion below.

Since their inception, we’ve seen some excellent implementations and some disastrous ones. The excellent implementations quickly lead users to the content they seek, and help discover items they didn’t know existed or wouldn’t have found otherwise. When implemented poorly, the tags just confuse the users and clutter the interface, not adding any value or meaning.

In this issue of UIEtips, Stephanie Lemieux explores what tagging might look like inside of the enterprise firewall. How does it work when we’re applying tags to serious business content? If you’re wondered whether there are benefits to a folksonomy on an intranet, you’ll want to read her article.

Read the article Social Tagging and the Enterprise—Does Tagging Work at Work?

Stephanie is taking tagging further, exploring the implementation patterns for both public-facing sites and enterprise content, in her upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World. Learn more about the March 10 webinar and Stephanie’s insights and ideas for successful implementations.

Get the details on Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World.

Have you explored tagging within your organization? What have you found that works? What should others avoid? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

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Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your questions. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in these podcasts.

In this episode, Jared Spool sits down with Peter to address many issues, including an interesting notion that Peter mentioned in the seminar;

“Browsing doesn’t scale.”

This came up in discussion about whether a site needs to be optimized towards search or towards browsing. Peter said that the two are all-but inseparable. The idea was that for very large sites, there comes a limit to how deep you can patiently navigate to reach the information you’re looking for. In these cases, many users would start their journey with a search, and then navigate from the results. An example of this use case can be seen with how many people use Amazon.com. Their visit to the immense site may start with a search for a particular product, author or artist, and then begin to navigate from their initial search results.

Best Result First Pattern

Another topic that proved popular was Peter’s Best Result First pattern. It may seem obvious that you want the best search result for a query to appear first in the results, but achieving that is not particularly easy. Peter suggests that it takes iterative tuning and testing while tweaking relevance algorithms, but then also pulling in other factors like popularity, date, and format data.

Advanced Search

Several attendees had questions about “advanced search.” Should it be built into sites to assist novice users sort through results better or to help sophisticated users dig more deeply? Others questioned if the notion of “advanced search” was dead altogether.

Peter replied that advanced search wasn’t dead, though many might wish it so. He observed that advanced search often causes confusion among users and many of these interfaces and options overwhelm them. He says you should design your search as if there would be no advanced search at all. One innovative way to give more control to searchers is to present search results with faceted navigation. This way advanced and novices users alike can have an understandable tool to filter through their results.

Faceted Navigation within Search Results

Not all sites work well with facets. If you have your doubts, you need to measure the use of the facets and see if they’re leading to success. However, it’s difficult to determine the success of the facets because trouble could mean either their implementation was done poorly, or that facets simply aren’t a good match for your site.

There was much more in this interview, and I invite you to tune in to get more great insight from Peter and Jared. And check back shortly for the second podcast interview for this seminar, with Mark Burrell. And don’t forget, you can still access the recording of the Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns seminar if you haven’t yet seen it.

What challenges are you facing with search on your site?

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

At year’s end, it’s common to reflect and revisit what you’ve done. We thought about the articles that had the biggest impact and really got people thinking.

Even if some readers didn’t agree with our conclusions, it started a discussion and brought awareness to some important user experience issues.

Here are the 5 favorite articles from 2009

• A Recession Strategy for Web Apps – In hard economic times, web-based applications are now an important element in an organization’s survival and growth strategy. Recessions are all about cutting waste and focusing in on activities that will have immediate, positive outcomes.
• Gerry McGovern Says “Manage the Tasks”I discuss with Gerry McGovern on how users’ performance on a site correlates strongly with their completion of tasks.
• 5 Design Decision Styles, What’s Yours? - I walk you through the five different styles we’ve found teams use to make design decisions.
• Great Designs Should be Experienced and Not Seen -I talk about how the goal of a designer is to make their site disappear.
• The $300 Million Button – How changing a button increased a site’s annual revenues by $300 million.

Its been a year full of high and low points. Many of us will face a challenging 2010 and user experience will be critical to any successful business. There are exciting things on the horizon and I can bet we’ll be in for a few pleasant surprises in the world of user experience during 2010.

We’ve got great plans in the upcoming year. Watch for new events such as the Web App Masters Tour and an amazing list of presenters for the UIE Virtual Seminars. As always, we’ll keep the articles and podcasts coming.

Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us.

The same is true clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve our needs and provide everything we’re seeking.

Unfortunately, much of the time, it doesn’t. The shame is it’s completely preventable — careful thought and design could’ve resulted in a delightful user experience.

In this UIEtips, I talk about some perils we’ve seen when users clicked on sponsored links, only to be disappointed by the results. Read the article, Three Perils with Search Landing Pages.

In addition to sponsored links, you also need to take care of your organic search results. In this week’s UIE Virtual Seminar, we have Shari Thurow sharing critical tips and techniques for getting the most from your search optimization efforts. Don’t miss her webinar.

How do you determine what ads to show when search is involved? Share your thoughts below.

Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to make that event seamless and as natural as possible. Unfortunately, few sites achieve that.

In our December 16 UIE Virtual Seminar, world-renowned SEO and web-usability expert, Shari Thurow, will show you how to tie together your team’s search engine optimization projects with your site’s usability efforts.

Shari has put together a fabulous quick preview of her presentation. You should watch it now.

It’s not an accident we turned to Shari Thurow when we wanted to talk about how to optimize a site’s usability to produce great search results. She’s the leading expert on what it takes to make a web site search-engine friendly, enhancing the user’s experience.

We love her new book, When Search Meets Web usability, which she co-wrote with Nick Musica. Want your own copy? We finagled a 35% discount off of this book (plus Free Shipping!) for the UIE audience. How cool is that? Just use the promotion code SEARCH when you purchase from the PeachPit/New Riders web site.

This webinar will help you bridge the gap between the web search engine and your site. You’ll learn techniques and tricks that will increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success. Register your team today!

How do you deliver the best search experience to your site’s users? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.)

About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users decided to move from one page to the next. Curiously, we found a consistent pattern, independent of the users’ previous experience or the design of the page. Upon reaching a page, the users scanned the page for the phrases or words that were important to them. If they found them, they’d try to click on them (or the link that seemed to go with them).

We call those magic phrases “Trigger Words”, because they trigger the user into action. They are key to understanding the secret to getting your users to the content they’re seeking. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t talk about their importance to one client or another.

That’s why we decided it’s time to republish the article we wrote about them, The Right Trigger Words. While we wrote this back in 2004 and the examples have aged a little (Analog’s home page, for example, now uses flyout menus instead of listing all the trigger words right on the page), the article is still the best resource we have to explain what we mean. I’m betting you’ll enjoy it.

Bringing this article up is timely, because it fits perfectly with Shari Thurow’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, When Search Meets Web Usability. Join us on the 12/16 webinar, and you’ll see how Shari uses trigger words to make sure you’re getting the most out of your search engine optimization efforts.

Are trigger words important to your design strategy? What techniques have you used to identify and integrate them into your site? Share your experiences below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk, Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little help from Adam Churchill, I recorded this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in helping users find what they seek, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit.

During the podcast, I dig into these questions:

• Should the failed search log be getting smaller if the design is good?
• Is there a correlation between search volume and customer satisfaction?
• How important is the number of search results shown? Do users want to see lots of results and filter down, or see fewer results and browse?
• Would you expect these results to change if you were studying Intranet sites?
• Is Advanced Search relevant or necessary?

Tune in to get some tips on how to get your users to what they seek. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2. In this article, Daniel explores specific aspects of faceted search interfaces that raise front-end usability concerns such as the search box and dealing with multiple selection. He then looks at a more holistic approach through design patterns.

If you’re in the process of implementing faceted search within your web site, or thinking about doing so, you’ll want to watch the upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar with Daniel Tunkelang and Pete Bell on faceted search. You’ll get some real insights into the challenges and tricks when implementing faceted search. And, as a bonus, you’ll get a free copy of Daniel’s book Faceted Search when you register. Read all about the virtual seminar and see a preview. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences below.

People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully sift through all of your content, quickly and effectively. Faceted search delivers on that promise, in spades, but not without good planning and a great strategy.

Pete and Daniel will show you before-and-after looks at e-commerce, media, corporate, and intranets sites. They will teach you the essentials you need to launch your own faceted search system and
discuss the pitfalls you’ll want to prepare for.

Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface
with Pete Bell & Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca
Thursday August 20, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation
Register to join us on August 20, watch Pete’s preview, or learn more details here.

Special Offer – Be one of the first to get Daniel Tunkelang’s new book, Faceted Search (published by Morgan and Claypool) for free when you register for this UIE Virtual Seminar. Choose from book or PDF version. Details to follow once you register for the UIE Virtual Seminar. Read an excerpt from the book here.

If you’re knee-deep in implementation, or working with folks who are designing for facets, be sure to set time aside for this presentation. And remember to look out for your free book after the presentation!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Is your organization considering the move to faceted search? What will you do differently? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

(If you aren’t familar with faceted search, Stephanie Lemieux wrote a great introduction, Designing for Faceted Search,  in a previous UIEtips.)

But setting up a system for faceted search has its challenges. Do it poorly and you will confuse and frustrate your users. They won’t reap the benefits of the design.

In today’s UIEtips, Daniel Tunkelang discusses the concerns designers face when building out the front-end of a faceted search system. He discusses where and when the design should present facets to the users and options for organizing them. If you’re embarking on a faceted search implementation, you’ll definitely enjoy this article.

Today’s article is an excerpt from Daniel’s new book: Faceted Search. You can get this book free when you register for Daniel and Pete’s UIE Virtual Seminar, also called Faceted Search. I recommend you gather your team together on August 20, 2009 and watch this seminar, as you’ll get some real insights in the challenges and tricks to implementing Faceted Search. Lots of stuff the search vendor’s salesman probably didn’t tell you. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences with us below.

Users arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something that’s important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they’ll be happy. When they don’t find it, frustration follows.

Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their users find what they seek. However our research has shown that technological magic isn’t going to make the users successful. Instead, it’s a simple understanding of what the users are seeking and how they look at it. We’ve put together the next UIE Virtual Seminar to address this Search issue.

Be prepared to see how Search fits into your site in an entirely new way. Not only will you come away with solid insights from the most up-to-date research, you’ll be chomping at the bit to start making improvements right away. And you’ll be on your way to the world of User Happiness.

UIE Virtual Seminar
Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit
with Jared M. Spool
Thursday July 9, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

Read more about the Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit, or see the great preview Jared put together, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What does your team struggle with when designing for Search? What type of feedback do you get from your users on how well they accomplish their goals on your site? What does a successful visit mean? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

In this week’s UIEtips, I conclude our feature discussion on producing great search results pages. In the article, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 2, I share behavior patterns we’ve uncovered as we researched how people interact with the results from a search query, including how they deal with link relevancy and the chunking of results. When we initially published these articles, there was some interesting buzz across the blogosphere. Our findings didn’t match conventional thinking. Almost a year has passed since the original prinitng, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these articles still creates some buzz. Below you can read comments from when we originally printed part 2.

If Search is high on your priority list, then you’ll want to attend the next UIE Virtual Seminar that I’m presenting: Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. In this seminar, I’ll smash some important myths to smithereens. You’ll see how the home page isn’t where people are searching from (and why that changes your entire Search strategy). And you’ll see how Search is more related to the links on your site than you ever imagined. Learn more about this UIE Virtual Seminar. 

When you’re watching your users interact with your site’s search result pages, what behaviors have you noticed? We’d love to hear your insights below.

In his post, Mike makes some excellent points, including pointing to the seminal work by Andrei Broder, A Taxonomy of Web Search (PDF), which talks about three types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. He suggests that my theory that users just want a single result, not a set of choices, is flawed. He wrote:

In my work at ibm.com, I noticed that the most preliminary searches often were informational ones. Someone might search for “e-mail archiving case studies”—they don’t want to get just one. Now, sure, if you have a page on your site that lists every blessed e-mail archiving case study, that would be a great #1 result, but you usually don’t have that kind of aggregation page for every possible query.

Searchers would not want your “Content Management Case Studies” page as #1, even if that list included every e-mail archiving case study, because it also includes too many other irrelevant case studies. Instead, searchers would love a list of case studies that match the query. They could scan through that list and click several results, drinking in that practical information they crave.

I think Mike is correct, if you look from the myopic viewpoint of the query itself. Starting with “e-mail archiving case studies,” the fact that it’s a plural, implies that the user wants a listing. But, that’s assuming that the user really wants to see e-mail archiving case studies.

I suggest that we start earlier in the user’s day. It’s likely that the user didn’t bolt out of bed first thing in the morning saying, “I need to type ‘e-mail archiving case studies’ into IBM.com and see what I get!” There’s some line of thinking and behavior that started this process.

Why does a user want to see the case studies? Are they looking to see that others had gone down the archiving road before them? Are they looking to compare vendors? Are they looking to solve a specific archiving problem (such as regulatory compliance in the pharmaceutical industry), but don’t know how to describe that for a successful query?

In any case, I’m betting that the user would be much happier with a single link that answers their specific need than a selection of links for them to choose between.

Developers trying to make a great On-site Search experience have the problem that they just have a list of queries and a corpus of content. They have to create matches between the query list and the available content.

But when you step back to the original goal of the user and ask what they need to accomplish that goal, you come up a different set of content altogether. The problem with Search is that we force the user to specify their goal in terms of the phrase they think will most likely produce a reasonable result.

Mike is right that the results need to be relevant. (I’ll talk about relevancy in part 2 of the article.) That’s the problem with the Content Management Case Studies result — it’s not really relevant.

But I think he’s wrong when he says that users are sometimes looking for a list of content, if you look at it from the holistic viewpoint of the user’s goal. They may settle for a selection list because of the poor state of what today’s Search experience delivers, but I think that isn’t what they really want.