STC Usability SIG Newsletter
Usability Interface

Report on the Telephone Seminar, "Looking, Finding, Searching…How Users Do It"

By Alice Preston

Whitney Quesenbery's telephone seminar on 19 November 2002 was an interesting experience for the 18 of us in the Telcordia™ Technologies conference room with the speakerphone turned up loud. It reminded me as much of a call-in radio show as it did of any other type of training we had ever taken, but this time the subject was really right for us.

We each had a printout of Whitney's visual materials, and followed along as she presented three 20-minute segments (with time for a few questions in the ten minutes between segments).

Whitney's subject was a discussion of findings in two usability tests cum observation. Unlike our usual informal observations of our own usage, here at last were results based on real research (that alone was exciting to some of us). Here are a few of the points that stayed with me:

1. Search as a conversation. Too often, Web and conventional applications leave the human out of the conversation. After all, it's the person's evaluation that determines success, not the delivery of any number of "hits." Many sites lose the user just when they're ready to start that evaluation. We found Whitney's story of people repeatedly clicking "Search Again" to be almost poignant. (They didn't see the hits that were unfortunately too far down the page.)

Users also had expectations that just about every search product will violate. For example, if they started by clicking links to narrow the area of exploration, they expected their subsequent Search would stay in topic. I understand that need; I have felt it myself on occasion. I bet none of us has ever helped create a product or site that worked that way.

2. Advanced Search is just too much. Although the sites she showed used a variety of clever ways to assist users in wording (or selecting) advanced search topics, none of the users ever tried them. There seemed to be better value in structuring the site to help users hone in without ever wording a formal search request at all. One site offered a winning combination of topic links and an indexed alphabetic list of topics, for example. In addition, the indexed list actually seduced users away from the magnetic Search field.
   
3. Careful construction of information about what you've found is key. We've all seen it, especially on the Web, where a list of results includes well-worded headings, entries that look like a random set of words, and abstruse filenames. Controlling the scope and the content can have a real effect on the success of your users.

In fact, trust and relationship turned out to have a stronger role than expected. When users finally found good information, some had a very strong need to complete the interaction. Whitney described how they arranged to get a printout for one participant, who was thrilled to find the information, and unwilling to risk losing it.

In my Usability Engineering group, we have agreed there is tremendous value in this seminar, at a low cost we can easily justify, especially when we can spread that value over a number of employees. We plan to do it again, and to investigate the remaining list of seminars carefully.