The User Experience Research team is rounding up a series of talks about the search experience at ACME. In Understanding the Search Experience @ ACME, part 1, we drew on the work of established researchers in the field and combined their work with our own research on our users. Fortunately, when it comes to search, we have a lot of data to help us. That’s because we have been studying how people search for several decades. When people search, the strategies they use are very similar – whether it’s searching in old-fashioned libraries or using a mobile application, whether it’s in a dusty archive filled with filing cabinets or using a gleaming new and very powerful desktop computer.

What we have learned from the research is that to understand the search experience, we don’t look at the technology. Rather, we start with the person, with his or her skills and knowledge. Then we move successively outward to encompass the user’s place in a larger organizational, social, and cultural context. We also look at a larger search life cycle where there many be many instances in which someone searches. This framework is the basis for broader language which helps us understand how people search for and discover information and transform it into knowledge:

The Search UX Framework

• First Dimension: The user’s skill and knowledge
• Second Dimension: The user’s goals
• Third Dimension: The user’s context
• Fourth Dimension: The user’s search mode in the search lifecycle

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User needs: search skill and domain knowledge

In my first talk, I focused on the first dimension of the search experience framework: the user’s skill and knowledge. Whenever a user searches, s/he draws on two capacities: 1. skill with the tool they are using to perform a search; and, 2, their understanding of the domain in which they are searching.

Users can fall anywhere on a continuum from novice to expert either in the tool, in the domain, or in both. All users have needs we can meet, through the way we design search. Those needs depend on the user’s competency level. Our applications can be improved by using certain design patterns that can help novices become more competent. We can even help experts with patterns that can help them avoid being frustrated by cumbersome tools designed for novices or or from having to deal with too much content clutter and interface debris which can distract them. Lots of helpful content might be good for a novice searcher, but it can often get in the way for more expert users.

What design patterns meet users’ needs?

If we want to help our users, we can start with some basic design patterns that consistently help novice users become more skilled and help expert users find the information they need as quickly as possible. Here are some suggestions for novice and expert users. How can we add these to our applications and Web sites to meet users needs? Are there other related patterns we might be able to use?

Design patterns for novices

Novices have problems orienteering themselves. They need to have reassurances as to where they are in the search flow – signposts to keep them oriented. They also need help understanding what they are looking at. For instance, they need help understanding jargon that might be well-understood by real estate agents and apartment managers, but not well understood by renters and home buyers. They also want to be able to trust the results they are seeing, so we need to learn to design for trust.

• Breadcrumbs on search pages
• Scoped search at query formulation
• Related search such as related ZIP Codes, cities, or neighborhoods
• Tutorials
• Tool tips

Design patterns for experts

Even though a user might be an expert at both searching and assessing the results of their queries, they still have problems and needs we can address. Experts can get frustrated by clunky designs that place extra steps in the way of getting results, by slow download speeds, by the debris and clutter that builds up in some interfaces which they find distracting.

• Advanced search menus
• In depth tutorials
• Help files and knowledge bases
• Faceted search
• Tool tips or animations that guide experts toward more advanced tools

User needs: preferred thinking patterns

Because search involves skills such as organizing, evaluating, and analyzing, one important and very unique aspect of the user experience that is often overlooked is that people preferred ways of thinking. People tend to be either analytical or holistic in their cognitive styles.

Holistic thinkers are adept at search: they tend to seek out the big picture in order to interpret their findings. They are motivated by external rewards and prefer to work in flexible environments where they eliminate constraints to better suit their needs. If they need anything from search design patterns, it’s the ability to alter their environment.

Analytical thinkers are detailed oriented and much like skilled craftsman. They break their work into smaller parts and systematically proceed through each task. Motivated by external rewards, analytical thinkers prefer structured environments and clear rules. Because they can get lost in the details, they can miss the forest for the trees. Analytical thinkers have more problems meeting their search needs: the spend 50% more time searching, visit twice as many pages, and use the back button or return to the home page often. (see findings from Kyung-Sun Kim, Information Seeking on the Web: Effects of user and task variables) The good news is: it’s easy to level out any differences between analytical and holistic thinkers with interaction patterns that improve analytical thinkers’ level of expertise.

Analytical thinkers need these design patterns:

• Contextual instructions
• Immersive, full-screen overlays
• Visual and content design clues
• Animations such as magnetism to draw attention

You can learn more about users in terms of the skill and knowledge competencies and how we can design for them, including improving our current search applications, by reviewing Understanding the Search Experience @ ACME, part 1.