Designing Search (part 3): Keeping on track by Tony Russell-Rose
From the post:
In the previous post we looked at techniques to help us create and articulate more effective queries. From auto-complete for lookup tasks to auto-suggest for exploratory search, these simple techniques can often make the difference between success and failure.
But occasionally things do go wrong. Sometimes our information journey is more complex than we’d anticipated, and we find ourselves straying off the ideal course. Worse still, in our determination to pursue our original goal, we may overlook other, more productive directions, leaving us endlessly finessing a flawed strategy. Sometimes we are in too deep to turn around and start again.
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Conversely, there are times when we may consciously decide to take a detour and explore the path less trodden. As we saw earlier, what we find along the way can change what we seek. Sometimes we find the most valuable discoveries in the most unlikely places.
However, there’s a fine line between these two outcomes: one person’s journey of serendipitous discovery can be another’s descent into confusion and disorientation. And there’s the challenge: how can we support the former, while unobtrusively repairing the latter? In this post, we’ll look at four techniques that help us keep to the right path on our information journey.
Whether you are writing a search interface or simply want to know more about what factors to consider in evaluating a search interface, this series by Tony Russell-Rose is well worth your time.
If you are writing a topic map, you already have as a goal the collection of information for some purpose. It would be sad if the information you collect isn’t findable due to poor interface design.