DESIGNING
THE SEARCH
EXPERIENCE
Maish Nichani
@maish
www.pebbleroad.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbtf1oyNg-8
“Just make it work like Google!”
User
Content
Context
Interface
Technology
Tuning
User
What we find
changes what we
seek.
Peter Morville, author of Search
Patterns
“
How many pounds in a kg?
?
?
Which mobile phone to buy for dad?
Which mobile phone to buy for dad?
? ? ?
?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/84894767/
Marcia Bates’
Berrypicking Model
Lookup
• Locate
• Verify
• Monitor
Learn
• Compare
• Comprehend
• Explore
Investigate
• Analyse
• Evaluate
• Synthesise
Designing the Search Experience, Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate
Info retrieval Info seeking
How many pounds in a kg?
Which mobile phone to buy for dad?
Which mobile phone to buy for dad?
Which neighbourhood in Vegas will yield the best rental returns?
The savviness factor
Designing the Search Experience, Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate
• Search is a conversation.• Identifying user-savviness and
their preferred search modes will help in designing better search experiences.
CHUNKS not
blobs.
Content
What is this?Content
Content
Resource description (metadata)
Content
Resource collection
No metadata, no search.
Content modelling
Content modelling is a process of
exploring and defining how content
types can be chunked and linked to
add value to customers and
businesses.
http://www.pebbleroad.com/perspectives/4-view-approach-to-content-modelling
Recipe content model
• Chunk your content types as per user needs.
• Build relationships between your content types.
Situations
matter.
Context
Haze
Rental prices
Esso
Dumplings
Taxi
…
Singapore Your product?
?
Mobile is
context on steroids
Haze
Rental prices
Esso
Dumplings
Taxi
…
Singapore Mobile
?
Location Identity Activity Time
Push Pull
PARAMETERS
ACTION
Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awarenesshttps://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/3389/99-22.pdf
Hidden actions
What will a context-aware app do
when I search for recipes?
What will a context-aware app do
when I search for recipes?
Identity: who usually writes a retrospect?
Time: Can I know when a retrospect is due?
Activity: Can I know when a retrospect is
being written?
Don’t forget the
journey to the
interface.
Interface
The beautiful box
Before the SERP
Popular searches
Before the SERP
Search zones
Before the SERP
Auto-suggestions
Search results pageFacets
Search snippet
Search snippet
Verify Re-find
Compare
Connect
Question If I have 30 content types, does that
mean I have to design 30 search
snippets?
Yes No
Best bets
Best bets
Foreign Domestic Worker
UF Maid
UF Helper
BT Foreign worker
RT Work Permit for Foreign Domestic Worker
…
Thesaurus
Now everyone
has access to
robust search
engines.
Technology
https://www.google.com.sg/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/
Dates
Duplicates
Entity extraction
Faceting
Multi-lingual
People search
Query management
Ranking
Sentiment analysis
Spell checking
Stemming and lemmatization
Stop words
Summarisation
Tokenization
…
https://www.algolia.com/https://swiftype.com/
The real work
starts after
you’ve
implemented
search.
Tuning
“The impact of search on business
performance depends more on the
level of investment in a skilled team of
people to support search than it does
on the level of investment in search
technology.”
Martin White, author of Enterprise
Search
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4RaGKwvMbY
“There’s absolutely no feature on your
website, none, that gets used as much
as internal search…
Your header, left nav, footer, main body,
promos on the right…None of them will
get used 10% of the time…
And site search is used probably much
more…”
Avinash Kaushik, author of Web
Analytics 2.0
Tuning
User
Content
ContextInterface
Technology
Site search analytics
Clickstream analytics
Usability tests
…
Data can come from different places
How many users are using the search box?
What are the top xx places users begin their searches?
What are the top xx search queries?
What are the top xx pages reached through search?
What are the queries with 0 results?
What are the queries with 0 click-throughs on the SERP?
How many times was search used immediately after the first SERP?
What are the queries that result in more than 3 SERPs?
How many users used facets or filters?
How many users use “best bets”?
…
User
Content
Context
Interface
Technology
Tuning
Thank You!
Maish Nichani
@maish
www.pebbleroad.com