IxD Meetup: Designing the Search Experience
Talk by Maish Nichani from PebbleRoad

Berry picking model
1. Lookup
2. Learn
3. Investigate

INFORMATION SEEKING
– search to understand the world around us
– help me make a decision

Ex: Rich Blocks Poor Blocks

User scenarios
– when…
– I want to…
– so I can…

Type of users:
Savviness factor

Search as a conversation

No metadata, no search

Content modeling
– exploring and defining how content types can be chunked and linked to add value to customers and business
– what descriptions do you have of this?

Situations matter
– change something because of context
– mobile is context on steroids
– I know everything about you, I can serve you the right information

Parameters – Action
Parameters
– location
– identity
– activity
– time

Action
– push
– pull
– hidden actions

What will a context aware app do?

Identity : who usually ______
Time
Activity

Don’t forget the journey to the interface
– Search patterns
– ex: popular searches
– search zones
– auto complete vs auto suggestion
– facets, search snippets
– verify, compare, re-find

Best bets
Alternate terms
Thesaurus

Now everyone has access to robust search engines

– How many using search
– What are the top places where they begin search
– Top queries
– Top pages reached through search
– Queries with 0 results
– Queries with 0 click throughs
– How many times a search was used after the first SERP
– queries that result in 3+ SERPS
– How many used filters
– How many used “best bets”

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