The UX of Search
UX Camp London
August 22, 2009
Stuart Cruickshank
Senior UX Developer, BBC Worldwide
@gaijinstu
gaijinstu@gmail.com

Before we start...
I have a confession to make

Before we start...
I have a confession to make
Yes...I’m Australian

It’s all about laws
Fitts’ Law
Krug’s 3 laws of usability
Jakob Neilsen
Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth
Jakobs’s Law of Internet User Experience

My first law of search
Pagination sucks

It’s everywhere!
Google Bing
Amazon Ask

It’s everywhere!
Google Bing
Amazon Ask
Yahoo! Flickr
Yahoo! search pagination design pattern

Problems
Disjointed experience (Scroll, click...wait...scroll, click...wait...)
Remembering which page a certain result was on
Accessibility issues
Being able to click on a small arrow/number
Screenreader re-reading text at start of the page

My first stop on Google

Is it really a problem?
Organic Ranking Visibility
(shown in a percentage of
participants looking at a
listing in this location)
Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%

How can we improve this experience?

1. Better results
Improved algorithms
Immediate filtering of results
Autosuggest
Faceted search
Kayak-type sliders
SXSW panel picker
Google Experimental : Preferred sites

2. Better search interface
“Endless scrolling”

Visual browsing tools
CoolIris

Visual browsing tools
Searchme

Visual browsing
Apple

Can you imagine...
+ Endless scrolling
+ Highlighted preferred sites
+ CoolIris-style image searching

My second law of search
Folksonomies suck
(Sometimes)

Flickr

Flickr

Flickr
Search interface: yes! Search results: no!

Getty Images Catalyst

My third law of search
Folksonomies rock
(Sometimes)

Delicious
A user generated search engine?

The flaw in my theory...
Order by no. of
times bookmarked?!

Google to the rescue

Google to the rescue

Where do we go from here?
Algorithms e.g. Google
User generated suggestions e.g. Delicious
Improved interface experiences

Thoughts?
Examples?
Abuse about the cricket?

Thanks!