Many websites rely on search instead of good information architecture, but many times search isn't well designed. This presentation reviews how to look at site search analytics, metadata and taxonomy, and user testing to improve the internal search
Keyword research is important to understand customers' search habits and determine an effective marketing strategy. There are various tools like Google, Microsoft AdCenter, and social media monitoring tools that can help identify relevant keywords. It is important to implement keyword research across traditional search and social media platforms. Continued keyword research is also needed as search habits evolve over time.
Fast Food Nation Student Presentation Outlinecrhude
This document outlines the structure and requirements for a research project presentation on whether fast food companies or consumers are to blame for obesity. The presentation must include an introduction outlining the relevance of obesity and introducing the thesis. Multiple points supporting the thesis need to be covered, using statistics and citations from Fast Food Nation to argue how marketing strategies, ingredients, and socioeconomic factors impact personal food choices and health. A conclusion reaffirms the thesis. Work cited in MLA format is required.
Advanced Google as a Tool for Promoting Evidence-Based Practicejeff_mason
A presentation given at the 2007 Canadian Health Libraries Association conference describing the results of a survey conducted to determine if providing advanced Google instruction meets the information needs of health care providers.
This document discusses the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys. It defines online surveys as surveys that are sent out and responded to over the web. Some key advantages include increased response rates due to convenience, low cost, real-time access to results, design flexibility, and lack of interviewer bias. However, disadvantages include potential for survey fraud, limited sampling, respondent availability issues, possible lower cooperation rates, and lack of interviewer clarification. The document provides details on online survey characteristics like purpose, design, sampling, and analysis.
This document describes several gadgets that can be used in an educational blog:
1. A slideshow gadget to display images related to topics being studied.
2. A poll gadget to get student input and allow analysis of poll results.
3. A list gadget to provide students access to reading materials and other resources.
4. A search gadget to allow students to search past blog posts and materials.
5. A text formatting gadget to draw attention to directions, questions, and information.
6. A link gadget to provide easy access to digital resources and external sites.
7. A news feed gadget to spark discussion topics related to class topics
This document outlines a rubric for evaluating digital posters on several criteria: time and work (20%), global appearance (20%), information (20%), links (20%), and technology skills (20%). For each criterion, descriptors are provided for performance levels of excellent, very good, acceptable, and need improvement, with associated point values from 4 to 1. The rubric will be used to assess elements like whether the poster was completed on time, its organization, the quality and relevance of information and links included, and correct formatting and sharing of the final poster.
The document discusses different types of data and storage systems. It begins by defining structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are described as being optimized for structured data through the use of schemas and SQL. While RDBMS work well with structured data, their rigid schemas can make adding or extending data difficult for large datasets.
The document discusses how taxonomy and metadata are essential for a successful digital asset management (DAM) system. It provides examples of taxonomies for different types of organizations, such as a quick service restaurant and consumer packaged goods company. Effective taxonomies are tailored to how different user groups search for and organize content. The document also provides guidance on how to design a taxonomy, such as identifying user groups, analyzing search behavior, and replicating existing folder structures.
Keyword research is important to understand customers' search habits and determine an effective marketing strategy. There are various tools like Google, Microsoft AdCenter, and social media monitoring tools that can help identify relevant keywords. It is important to implement keyword research across traditional search and social media platforms. Continued keyword research is also needed as search habits evolve over time.
Fast Food Nation Student Presentation Outlinecrhude
This document outlines the structure and requirements for a research project presentation on whether fast food companies or consumers are to blame for obesity. The presentation must include an introduction outlining the relevance of obesity and introducing the thesis. Multiple points supporting the thesis need to be covered, using statistics and citations from Fast Food Nation to argue how marketing strategies, ingredients, and socioeconomic factors impact personal food choices and health. A conclusion reaffirms the thesis. Work cited in MLA format is required.
Advanced Google as a Tool for Promoting Evidence-Based Practicejeff_mason
A presentation given at the 2007 Canadian Health Libraries Association conference describing the results of a survey conducted to determine if providing advanced Google instruction meets the information needs of health care providers.
This document discusses the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys. It defines online surveys as surveys that are sent out and responded to over the web. Some key advantages include increased response rates due to convenience, low cost, real-time access to results, design flexibility, and lack of interviewer bias. However, disadvantages include potential for survey fraud, limited sampling, respondent availability issues, possible lower cooperation rates, and lack of interviewer clarification. The document provides details on online survey characteristics like purpose, design, sampling, and analysis.
This document describes several gadgets that can be used in an educational blog:
1. A slideshow gadget to display images related to topics being studied.
2. A poll gadget to get student input and allow analysis of poll results.
3. A list gadget to provide students access to reading materials and other resources.
4. A search gadget to allow students to search past blog posts and materials.
5. A text formatting gadget to draw attention to directions, questions, and information.
6. A link gadget to provide easy access to digital resources and external sites.
7. A news feed gadget to spark discussion topics related to class topics
This document outlines a rubric for evaluating digital posters on several criteria: time and work (20%), global appearance (20%), information (20%), links (20%), and technology skills (20%). For each criterion, descriptors are provided for performance levels of excellent, very good, acceptable, and need improvement, with associated point values from 4 to 1. The rubric will be used to assess elements like whether the poster was completed on time, its organization, the quality and relevance of information and links included, and correct formatting and sharing of the final poster.
The document discusses different types of data and storage systems. It begins by defining structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are described as being optimized for structured data through the use of schemas and SQL. While RDBMS work well with structured data, their rigid schemas can make adding or extending data difficult for large datasets.
The document discusses how taxonomy and metadata are essential for a successful digital asset management (DAM) system. It provides examples of taxonomies for different types of organizations, such as a quick service restaurant and consumer packaged goods company. Effective taxonomies are tailored to how different user groups search for and organize content. The document also provides guidance on how to design a taxonomy, such as identifying user groups, analyzing search behavior, and replicating existing folder structures.
Rethinking Search Results from a UX PerspectiveBrian Frank
Post-secondary education websites have evolved a lot over the past decade. Search results pages have hardly changed. We’re long overdue to envision better ways to help users find what they’re looking for, faster and with fewer frustrations.
By looking at tested examples of user interfaces from ecommerce and other industries, we’ll explore ideas for radically rethinking the search experience on post-secondary websites. We’ll also discuss tips for using research to guide these decisions and avoid copying design patterns that aren’t suited to post-secondary information or user needs.
Rethinking Search Results from the Users' PerspectiveSarah Khan
The document summarizes strategies for improving university and college website search functions from a user-centered perspective. It recommends a three-phase approach: 1) Understand users through analytics, user flows and interviews; 2) Clean up content and leverage existing search features; 3) Test improvements like featured results, grouped results, redirects, autosuggestions and scoped/contextual search. The document cautions against "technology-first" approaches and advocates testing changes with users to address small usability issues that make a big difference in search experiences.
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience. Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
How To Drive Data Driven Change In A Legacy OrganizationJovi Pinon
LexisNexis was a pioneer in digitization of legal and journalistic documents, but it has not been a very data-driven organization. In this presentation I discuss how the Product Analytics team is pushing data-driven change in our organization. Being a legacy company, most product decisions were made based on the product owners’ experience or sales' understanding of what our customers want. Now we are taking a more evidence-based approach. I am going to share my experience of how we collaborate with the User Experience team to create customer centric product enhancements. This talk will give you an idea on how to understand the “What” and “Why” of customer problems and come up with solutions based on behavioral analytics and user experience data. Along with the success story this presentation will also highlight the constraints, intermediate failures, and lessons learnt.
Introduction to Microsoft Search #SRC101 #365EduCon 20211214Kanwal Khipple
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience.
Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
Safeabilty: Analyzing the Relationship between Safety and Reliability PlantEngineering
-What if we treated maintenance and reliability improvement like safety?
-How Would that change our focus? our tactics?
-What techniques could we apply directly from the other areas?
-How are the two the same and how are they different?
Semantic Search Engine using OntologiesIJRES Journal
Nowadays the volume of the information on the Web is increasing dramatically. Facilitating users to get useful information has become more and more important to information retrieval systems. While information retrieval technologies have been improved to some extent, users are not satisfied with the low precision and recall. With the emergence of the Semantic Web, this situation can be remarkably improved if machines could “understand” the content of web pages. The existing information retrieval technologies can be classified mainly into three classes.The traditional information retrieval technologies mostly based on the occurrence of words in documents. It is only limited to string matching. However, these technologies are of no use when a search is based on the meaning of words, rather than onwards themselves.Search engines limited to string matching and link analysis. The most widely used algorithms are the PageRank algorithm and the HITS algorithm. The PageRank algorithm is based on the number of other pages pointing to the Web page and the value of the pages pointing to it. Search engines like Google combine information retrieval techniques with PageRank. In contrast to the PageRank algorithm, the HITS algorithm employs a query dependent ranking technique. In addition to this, the HITS algorithm produces the authority and the hub score. The widespread availability of machine understandable information on the Semantic Web offers which some opportunities to improve traditional search. If machines could “understand” the content of web pages, searches with high precision and recall would be possible.
The document outlines a research project to identify opportunities to improve the Amazon shopping experience. It will explore areas of frustration for users browsing and searching, discover specific pain points, and develop solutions. The research will involve contextual inquiries, surveys, task analysis and scenarios to understand how users navigate categories, search results, and reviews. The goal is to improve usability and support user goals for both browsing and searching.
Starting From Zero - Winning Strategies for Zero Results PageRamzi Alqrainy
In my experience, the effort and ingenuity a product team invests in the no search results page is indicative of its overall dedication to customer success.Ignoring this special kind of search results page virtually guarantees a mediocre search experience and contributes to obscurity in the ecommerce marketplace. On the other hand, if a team thinks creatively about the case when there are no search results and focuses on customer needs, it can turn a temporary snag in communication into an opportunity for deeper connection and a source of tremendous competitive advantage.
The document provides guidance on best practices for creating online surveys. It recommends that surveys have a clear objective, be short (under 10 minutes), use closed-ended questions for easy analysis of results, ask one question per topic, avoid biased or ambiguous wording, have a logical flow of questions, and be tested before widespread distribution. The document also provides tips on question order, required fields, and avoiding mutually exclusive answers. The overall aim is to collect useful data from respondents in the most efficient and effective way possible.
User Research to Validate Product Ideas WorkshopProduct School
Learn how to leverage User Research techniques to validate customer demand for new products and features before writing a line of code.
See best UX best practices, different user testing experiences (Moderated & Unmoderated) and how to analyze user flows.
You don’t need a big budget, weeks of time or special labs to get user insights quickly and inexpensively. We’ll discuss how you can meet your goals, improve your products and make informed decisions through user research. Usability testing (remote & in-person), interviews, surveys and analytics are a few methods we’ll review, particularly in the context of your own business challenges and user questions.
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience. Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
Product lessons from the launch of Unified Search, a massive redesign of LinkedIn's search experience, presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business High Tech Club on May 16, 2014
- The document provides tips and lessons learned from TechTarget's experience with A/B and multivariate testing over the past 6 years.
- The first tip is to run multiple test waves as results from initial tests can inform additional iterations, such as a registration test that saw a 30% lift from the first test and 60% lift from a second dynamic display test.
- The second tip is to combine quantitative metrics with qualitative user research and feedback to better understand "why" certain changes are successful and inform additional tests, as was done with a site redesign that showed positive metrics but also user frustration with navigation that required changes.
- Other tips included viewing many different metrics that provide context beyond the main success metric, ensuring
The document discusses optimizing content findability. It emphasizes the importance of governance, organization, user involvement, and metadata to improve search and findability. Successful organizations allocate resources to analyze search usage and improve information architecture through taxonomy and metadata. User testing, feedback loops, and search analytics are also recommended to enhance findability.
Sam Marshall of ClearBox consulting and David Francoeur, of Bonzai taking a non-technical look at intranet search, to help you improve results and the overall experience.
If you're responsible for search configuration then we welcome you, but this webinar is also for intranet managers and digital team members who care about content and ensuring the intranet is truly useful to colleagues.
The business cost of poor search
Why intranet search is hard
How to improve the search user experience
Ways to diagnose why search fails
Quick ways to enhance your search results.
Acing the Product Execution (PE) Interview by Amazon Sr PMProduct School
Main takeaways:
-Structure of a good answer for a PE-style question.
-Defining the right success metrics for your product.
-Is a North Star metric really required?
SEO & Content Together. How SEO can help to improve your content strategy and get maximum ROI via search engine & branding. How to get branded content on top rank in search engines? How to create intent-based content to get maximum ROI?
Taxonomy is a useful way to categorize your content so you can find it, re-use it, and help users browse and search through your content. It also helps with search engine optimization.
1. The document discusses three ways to make taxonomy development more effective: considering next steps in design; taking into account team and technology capabilities; and thinking strategically before design.
2. It provides examples from projects where lessons were learned about understanding stakeholder needs, educating others about taxonomy, and ensuring technology capabilities support the taxonomy.
3. Thinking strategically involves doing research, identifying possibilities and conditions needed, barriers, and efforts to overcome barriers in order to support business goals with the taxonomy.
Rethinking Search Results from a UX PerspectiveBrian Frank
Post-secondary education websites have evolved a lot over the past decade. Search results pages have hardly changed. We’re long overdue to envision better ways to help users find what they’re looking for, faster and with fewer frustrations.
By looking at tested examples of user interfaces from ecommerce and other industries, we’ll explore ideas for radically rethinking the search experience on post-secondary websites. We’ll also discuss tips for using research to guide these decisions and avoid copying design patterns that aren’t suited to post-secondary information or user needs.
Rethinking Search Results from the Users' PerspectiveSarah Khan
The document summarizes strategies for improving university and college website search functions from a user-centered perspective. It recommends a three-phase approach: 1) Understand users through analytics, user flows and interviews; 2) Clean up content and leverage existing search features; 3) Test improvements like featured results, grouped results, redirects, autosuggestions and scoped/contextual search. The document cautions against "technology-first" approaches and advocates testing changes with users to address small usability issues that make a big difference in search experiences.
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience. Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
How To Drive Data Driven Change In A Legacy OrganizationJovi Pinon
LexisNexis was a pioneer in digitization of legal and journalistic documents, but it has not been a very data-driven organization. In this presentation I discuss how the Product Analytics team is pushing data-driven change in our organization. Being a legacy company, most product decisions were made based on the product owners’ experience or sales' understanding of what our customers want. Now we are taking a more evidence-based approach. I am going to share my experience of how we collaborate with the User Experience team to create customer centric product enhancements. This talk will give you an idea on how to understand the “What” and “Why” of customer problems and come up with solutions based on behavioral analytics and user experience data. Along with the success story this presentation will also highlight the constraints, intermediate failures, and lessons learnt.
Introduction to Microsoft Search #SRC101 #365EduCon 20211214Kanwal Khipple
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience.
Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
Safeabilty: Analyzing the Relationship between Safety and Reliability PlantEngineering
-What if we treated maintenance and reliability improvement like safety?
-How Would that change our focus? our tactics?
-What techniques could we apply directly from the other areas?
-How are the two the same and how are they different?
Semantic Search Engine using OntologiesIJRES Journal
Nowadays the volume of the information on the Web is increasing dramatically. Facilitating users to get useful information has become more and more important to information retrieval systems. While information retrieval technologies have been improved to some extent, users are not satisfied with the low precision and recall. With the emergence of the Semantic Web, this situation can be remarkably improved if machines could “understand” the content of web pages. The existing information retrieval technologies can be classified mainly into three classes.The traditional information retrieval technologies mostly based on the occurrence of words in documents. It is only limited to string matching. However, these technologies are of no use when a search is based on the meaning of words, rather than onwards themselves.Search engines limited to string matching and link analysis. The most widely used algorithms are the PageRank algorithm and the HITS algorithm. The PageRank algorithm is based on the number of other pages pointing to the Web page and the value of the pages pointing to it. Search engines like Google combine information retrieval techniques with PageRank. In contrast to the PageRank algorithm, the HITS algorithm employs a query dependent ranking technique. In addition to this, the HITS algorithm produces the authority and the hub score. The widespread availability of machine understandable information on the Semantic Web offers which some opportunities to improve traditional search. If machines could “understand” the content of web pages, searches with high precision and recall would be possible.
The document outlines a research project to identify opportunities to improve the Amazon shopping experience. It will explore areas of frustration for users browsing and searching, discover specific pain points, and develop solutions. The research will involve contextual inquiries, surveys, task analysis and scenarios to understand how users navigate categories, search results, and reviews. The goal is to improve usability and support user goals for both browsing and searching.
Starting From Zero - Winning Strategies for Zero Results PageRamzi Alqrainy
In my experience, the effort and ingenuity a product team invests in the no search results page is indicative of its overall dedication to customer success.Ignoring this special kind of search results page virtually guarantees a mediocre search experience and contributes to obscurity in the ecommerce marketplace. On the other hand, if a team thinks creatively about the case when there are no search results and focuses on customer needs, it can turn a temporary snag in communication into an opportunity for deeper connection and a source of tremendous competitive advantage.
The document provides guidance on best practices for creating online surveys. It recommends that surveys have a clear objective, be short (under 10 minutes), use closed-ended questions for easy analysis of results, ask one question per topic, avoid biased or ambiguous wording, have a logical flow of questions, and be tested before widespread distribution. The document also provides tips on question order, required fields, and avoiding mutually exclusive answers. The overall aim is to collect useful data from respondents in the most efficient and effective way possible.
User Research to Validate Product Ideas WorkshopProduct School
Learn how to leverage User Research techniques to validate customer demand for new products and features before writing a line of code.
See best UX best practices, different user testing experiences (Moderated & Unmoderated) and how to analyze user flows.
You don’t need a big budget, weeks of time or special labs to get user insights quickly and inexpensively. We’ll discuss how you can meet your goals, improve your products and make informed decisions through user research. Usability testing (remote & in-person), interviews, surveys and analytics are a few methods we’ll review, particularly in the context of your own business challenges and user questions.
Microsoft Search is looking to bring the search experiences across all Microsoft 365 services together into a single unified experience. Attend this session to learn how the experience impacts your users, how you can configure it as well as scenarios where you should customize it.
Product lessons from the launch of Unified Search, a massive redesign of LinkedIn's search experience, presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business High Tech Club on May 16, 2014
- The document provides tips and lessons learned from TechTarget's experience with A/B and multivariate testing over the past 6 years.
- The first tip is to run multiple test waves as results from initial tests can inform additional iterations, such as a registration test that saw a 30% lift from the first test and 60% lift from a second dynamic display test.
- The second tip is to combine quantitative metrics with qualitative user research and feedback to better understand "why" certain changes are successful and inform additional tests, as was done with a site redesign that showed positive metrics but also user frustration with navigation that required changes.
- Other tips included viewing many different metrics that provide context beyond the main success metric, ensuring
The document discusses optimizing content findability. It emphasizes the importance of governance, organization, user involvement, and metadata to improve search and findability. Successful organizations allocate resources to analyze search usage and improve information architecture through taxonomy and metadata. User testing, feedback loops, and search analytics are also recommended to enhance findability.
Sam Marshall of ClearBox consulting and David Francoeur, of Bonzai taking a non-technical look at intranet search, to help you improve results and the overall experience.
If you're responsible for search configuration then we welcome you, but this webinar is also for intranet managers and digital team members who care about content and ensuring the intranet is truly useful to colleagues.
The business cost of poor search
Why intranet search is hard
How to improve the search user experience
Ways to diagnose why search fails
Quick ways to enhance your search results.
Acing the Product Execution (PE) Interview by Amazon Sr PMProduct School
Main takeaways:
-Structure of a good answer for a PE-style question.
-Defining the right success metrics for your product.
-Is a North Star metric really required?
SEO & Content Together. How SEO can help to improve your content strategy and get maximum ROI via search engine & branding. How to get branded content on top rank in search engines? How to create intent-based content to get maximum ROI?
Taxonomy is a useful way to categorize your content so you can find it, re-use it, and help users browse and search through your content. It also helps with search engine optimization.
1. The document discusses three ways to make taxonomy development more effective: considering next steps in design; taking into account team and technology capabilities; and thinking strategically before design.
2. It provides examples from projects where lessons were learned about understanding stakeholder needs, educating others about taxonomy, and ensuring technology capabilities support the taxonomy.
3. Thinking strategically involves doing research, identifying possibilities and conditions needed, barriers, and efforts to overcome barriers in order to support business goals with the taxonomy.
Taxonomies are essential to making the web "go". Information architects and content strategists can use and promote taxonomy within their organizations to increase findability and usability of a website. Learn more about taxonomies and see some great examples.
Diagnosing and Solving Content Problems - Information Architecture and Conten...Theresa Putkey
A step-by-step process for looking at your website, discovering the problems with the content, prioritizing these problems and then solving them. Takes an information architecture and content strategy approach.
Intersections of Information Architecture and Content StrategyTheresa Putkey
The document discusses the intersection of information architecture, content strategy, and user experience. It begins with definitions of information architecture and content strategy, noting they both deal with organizing and presenting information but information architecture is more spatial while content strategy is more temporal. It then compares the tools and deliverables of each, such as site maps and wireframes. The document discusses how information architecture and content strategy can work together on activities like usability testing and content inventories. It concludes by considering the future of both fields and how practitioners can better communicate and work across the disciplines.
Guiding Others Through the Maze: Working with Stakeholders to Build a TaxonomyTheresa Putkey
The document discusses how to guide stakeholders through building a taxonomy. It recommends holding a taxonomy workshop to provide history, examples, and an overview of the process. If a workshop is not possible, concepts should be covered one-on-one using examples. The taxonomy should be reviewed and iterated on frequently to get feedback and demonstrate functionality. Involving stakeholders in building parts allows them to learn, and maintenance indicates understanding of principles.
The document discusses principles of taxonomy. It covers a brief history of taxonomies, modern uses of taxonomies, the purpose of taxonomies including finding related items and improving search results, and how to build and maintain a taxonomy including conducting a content audit and determining relationships between terms. It also discusses transferring taxonomy skills to other domains.
Transitioning from Technical Communicator to User Experience ProfessionalTheresa Putkey
Gives motivations and reasons to move from technical communication to user experience, plus job description comparisons, how to reposition yourself, and resources for more information.
Suggestions for websites, networking groups, interviewing, and working for technical communicators. Focused on the Vancouver, BC area, but has general information, too.
Securing BGP: Operational Strategies and Best Practices for Network Defenders...APNIC
Md. Zobair Khan,
Network Analyst and Technical Trainer at APNIC, presented 'Securing BGP: Operational Strategies and Best Practices for Network Defenders' at the Phoenix Summit held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 23 to 24 May 2024.
Honeypots Unveiled: Proactive Defense Tactics for Cyber Security, Phoenix Sum...APNIC
Adli Wahid, Senior Internet Security Specialist at APNIC, delivered a presentation titled 'Honeypots Unveiled: Proactive Defense Tactics for Cyber Security' at the Phoenix Summit held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 23 to 24 May 2024.
HijackLoader Evolution: Interactive Process HollowingDonato Onofri
CrowdStrike researchers have identified a HijackLoader (aka IDAT Loader) sample that employs sophisticated evasion techniques to enhance the complexity of the threat. HijackLoader, an increasingly popular tool among adversaries for deploying additional payloads and tooling, continues to evolve as its developers experiment and enhance its capabilities.
In their analysis of a recent HijackLoader sample, CrowdStrike researchers discovered new techniques designed to increase the defense evasion capabilities of the loader. The malware developer used a standard process hollowing technique coupled with an additional trigger that was activated by the parent process writing to a pipe. This new approach, called "Interactive Process Hollowing", has the potential to make defense evasion stealthier.
1. 3 Ways to Improve Searchability
Theresa Putkey
Information Architect & Taxonomist
tputkey@keypointe.ca
@tputkey
www.keypointe.ca
2. Search is an afterthought, even though
we say users can use it to find
everything*.
*the kitchen sink, my missing sock, my sunglasses that I took on vacation and
were “lost” in my suitcase for 2 months
3. Why Do I Care About Searchability?
● Search is one of the two main ways users find
information
● Search is easy to implement but hard to make effective
● Users are typically untrained searchers and need help
4. Users change search strategy only 1% of the time;
99% of the time they plod along a single unwavering
path.
Whether the true number is 2% or 0.5%, the big-picture
conclusion is the same: users have extraordinarily
inadequate research skills when it comes to solving
problems on the Web.
Jakob Nielsen
www.nngroup.com/articles/incompetent-search-skills/
5. What Is Searchability?
Definition: The ease with which users can search for
information on your site. Users start with the search box,
enter a term, and then continue to refine their results
either with filters or more search terms.
6. What Is Searchability?
In this context, I am talking about on-site search, or
internal search, and not external search from a search
engine.
8. Look at Site Search Analytics
● Site search analytics essentially keep track of
everything that users have searched for on your site
● What are the most frequently searched terms?
9. Look at Metadata and Taxonomy
● Are you using metadata and taxonomy?
● Are you using them consistently?
● Can users filter search results by metadata and
taxonomy?
● Does your taxonomy support synonyms and
keywords?
10. Test It!
● Doing user testing helps find more problems
● Plan and conduct user testing that focuses on search
and search results refinement
● Problems can include unclear use of filters, badly laid
out filters, or a badly designed search results page
12. Site Search Analytics
● Go on! Search for those frequently searched terms.
See what comes up. Are these results appropriate?
● Can the site search be adjusted to show promoted
results?
● Why aren’t the right pages showing up? Could it have
something to do with metadata and taxonomy?
13. Metadata and Taxonomy
● Improve the metadata and taxonomy
● Improve the synonyms and keywords in the taxonomy
● Use metadata and taxonomy consistently
● Improve the search engine results page to show filters
14. User Testing Results
● Prioritize the findings from the user testing
● Plan how to resolve these issues either on the web
team, with the content creators, or the website/IT
team
16. Learn More
● Follow the Key Pointe Newsletter at http://bit.
ly/2atccXl
● Read Ambient Findability by Peter Morville
● Read Search Analytics for Your Site by Louis
Rosenfeld
● Read Designing the Search Experience by Tony
Russell-Rose