Boxes and Arrows has a great article about Searching. The article is worth reading and the discussion thread is fantastic.

Stephen Turbek’s “Advancing Advanced Search” is a great chronicle of the good, the bad and the ugly on about advanced searches. My favorite part is when he writes about how we ended up where we are. “In the quest to make web sites more usable, we settled on a pattern of a clean, minimal search box with a link to an advanced search page. Jakob Nielsen recommended, ‘use an intimidating name like ‘advanced search’ to scare off novice users from getting into the page and hurting themselves.’”

Stephen dissects advanced searches, parameter searching, tagging, faceted, filtering, and progressive disclosure. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

In my experience designing interactions for higher education, financial services, b2b, healthcare and non-profit, search in general is a tool used by people who can’t find what they are looking for right away or people who know precisely what they are looking for and poses the vocabulary to get good results.

Regardless of simple or advanced search, search is used to find stuff (no duh, I know). My question is this: how would progressive search or even super-duper-complicated searches like the one found on google.com help users find the same information the second time they go looking for it?

Granted, this question is irrelevant for sites where content is transient, such as Expedia or Ebay, and for sites where the search index is always changing such as Google and Yahoo – but I insist this is an important question for sites where content is more fixed than it’s not.

Progressive searching could be a great way to help people find what they are looking for, but my gut tells me that its implementation would be more useful and appropriate for transient content.

Different sites have different search needs. Some sites don’t (and shouldn’t) have searches at all. Healthcare

Labels: boxes and arrows, progressive disclosure, search engines, usability

I was watching the BCS Championship last night when this super, extreme uber-commercial came on. At first I thought that it was only a commercial for this movie that I have never heard of called Jumpers. The movie didn’t look good to me at all. Actually it looked absolutely horrible.

As the Jumpers commercial progresses, the main character turns on his TV and jumps into an HP commercial that has been airing for some time now. He then is walking around that commercial as it plays on. When the HP commercial ends, he jumps out and the original Jumpers commercial starts up again. I am not really impressed by the artistic vision of the Jumpers spot (the HP commercials are great though), but I am really intrigued by one commercial being inside of another.

Jumpers and HP weren’t the only ones mentioned throughout this 2 in 1 advertisement. When the TV turns on a Microsoft Vista logo appears on the screen, and a Windows Live Search bar appears in the post-production data/charts. Then Andre 3000 gets a little play, as Serena talks about the music that she’s into. She then goes to explain her new clothing line with Nike and her own venture with her clothing company Aneres. When its all said and done, there are 5 companies and 1 artist given face time in a matter of 3 commercial slot times.

We have seen the symbiotic relationships between movies and other industries many times before, and very often in the past 15 years. HP seems to be really focusing on bringing other companies into their commercials; the Jerry Seinfield spot includes this mentality also. Still it must take great legal tip-toeing and cooperation of all parties involved, but as companies work together it benefits everyone involved.