.oO Tailwind

For those of you who aren’t yet into virtual game arena Second Life, do so quickly.

I saw today thanks to Springwise that Canadian , Telus has recently opened a virtual store within Shinda, a location within Second Life. While its not new that real companies are finding their way onto the Second Life ‘grid’ it’s interesting that this is the first telco to bite. View the Shinda SLurl here to get a picture of where the land lies.
Other businesses that have opened include American Apparel, Toyota (via Scion) and the Aloft Hotel, all of these movements have been well discussed - though not here, so the move itself is not major news.

What is interesting is where they take it and whether they choose to do more than an awareness campaign and actually look to have first mover advantage in this growing virtual world. There are obvious things that can be done with telephony and communication services, they are currently selling handsets for a few hundred Linden Dollars (Second Life’s currency), but the only thing that can be done is to push busy messages to people.

As the real world teclos scramble with other technology service providers and media companies to own the single pipe into people’s homes, I’m interested to see the battle that could realise itself in a virtual form with someone tying up a full service package that allows you to bridge communication within the virtual and real worlds, it’s anyone’s really.

lumalive

Originally uploaded by Snow_badger.

Moving on from the Electro-Graf shown yesterday, spotted this Lumalive Fabric on Core77 too.

The Philips website says this about Lumalive: “Lumalive textiles make it possible to create fabrics that carry dynamic advertisements, graphics and constantly changing color surfaces.”

The idea of wearing illuminated advertisements is an interesting one, as people who wear labelled clothing endorse brands anyway, but this seems somehow more invasive and less subtle.

I can see this working really well for the Police, Fireservices etc when at a an incident scene or indeed for Pill chomping ravers who want to tell you how good a night they are having.

Personally, whenever I’ve been fishing (which hasn’t been for a while) I’d like one of these to say - “Been here 3 hours, caught nothing, so leave me a lone”

Minority Report - here we come.

The Notting Hill Carnival is on today but I can’t go.

It’s a huge giggle, loads of nice food being cooked in the street, great atmosphere and loads of picture opportunities for me to flood my Flickr account with. But because I have a 7 day old baby and am largely house bound at the moment - I will not be going. Boooooo.

No doubt my buddies Jason and Fosta will be there widing and grinding and eatin ‘chickon’.

Anyone with good articles, pictures etc let me know!

Stage 2 of the search user experience is another one that takes place without the user really doing anything. In this stage we look at the ways in which both implicit and explicit personalisation occurs to shape the user experience in a meaningful way.

This stage is of particular topical interest as Google come under fire for a personalisation patent infringement.

Some are obviously cookie or IP sniff based and infer some level of personalisation (i.e. Google automatically re-routing you to the local country domain), whilst some allow you to customise the display, personalise input preferences, whilst others go as far as to allow you to create custom search resources (I mentioned in an earlier post the service from Rollyo. This is of course enabled through a registration.

Of course there are a whole range of tools that come off the back of explicit personalisation, including services such as Yahoo! My Web where users can save, find and share favourite web pages. However, I’ll deal with these more later as the aspect of personalisation I wish to highlight currently are those features that facilitate query submission or the default disaply of results.

The aim of such ‘tailoring’ is to short-cut certain aspects of the UX for the user in order to speed-up, appropriate or improve the accuracy/relevance of their result set or indeed to customise the display of those results.

One other area to consider is the ‘default states’ of search options. Whilst not strictly personalisation choices, the fact that the ‘Safe Search’ tool is on by default defends the brand and meets user expectations as to how something should behave. For example, it would be disastrous if an organisation with ‘family equity’ in its brand such as the BBC were to provide a web search tool that trawled adult content and revaled all by default.

As users take more control over their user experience, searches launched from desktop widgets, browser tools or otherwise increasingly allow users to control their information sources, prioritisation and display. So it stands to reason that the more customisable your search tool is, the better it will fair in this two-way web 2.0 kinda world.

This idea of users controlling the way in which they access SERPs is fairly topical as this post at Search Engine Watch supports as it describes Google Base features allowing users access to result sets via RSS.

Interesting…More later

Other stages yet to cover:

1. 3) Query Formulation
2. 4) Error Prevention and Correction
3. 5) Browsing Results
4. 6) Refining Results
5. 7) Discovering More

Sorry for the lack of consistency of late - We’ve just had a baby, our second and life is majorly busy as you’d expect. She’s a girl and is doing very well, but the change in sleep pattern is giving us a challenge.

It makes me wonder why we don’t start adjusting our sleep before the baby arrives, but hey, it’ snot for long and being a father is about as good as life gets.

I’m off work now for about 3 weeks, so my head is in a different space. I’ll keep up the 7 Stages of Search Experience and will post a section a day as I know that there’s nothing more annoying than sporadic posts.

Also, thanks for the emails sent so far. Much appreciated.

The first stage opens with the proposition of functionality and purpose to users.

‘What is it?’, ‘what are you offering?’ and ‘how do I play with it?’ are question running through the subconscious mind.
The homepages of these different sites offer very different propositions to users in terms of what search is and how it works:

1. • Google
2. • A9
3. • BBC
4. • eBay
5. • RollYo

How they perceive the tool is key to their application and usage of it and this perception of ‘what it is’ shapes the kind of information they’ll use it to search for and assist in defining their mental model of what the site can do.

In this instance, perception is core to ease of use.

The perception of what it is that search does is affected by both the brand and by the placement and positioning of the search tool within the information hierarchy of the page.

In a Web 2.0 context, this becomes increasingly interesting as we consider the impact of executing searches away from homepages using browser extensions, desktop widgets and tools such as Rollyo.

Rollyo - or ‘Roll your own’ is a great little tool that sits in your toolbar and allows you instant access to search either the site you are on or it allows the user to constrain their search to a set of handpicked resources. It’s great for using on sites that have a crappy search tool and is a typical example of how users can experience your site on their terms.

Anyway, back to it as I think that thread of discussion warrants a post in its own right.

Placement of the search tool:
In terms of information design, the placement of search within the page has the effect of communicating how important the tool is a mode of interaction within a given site. If it is small and unassuming it could be argued that it is not the main navigation device or that it is the least preferred mode for discovering target content. Conversely, if it dominates the page it clearly suggests that search is a key way for finding information. That said, a search device does not have to dominate the page to be well placed and understood.

Yell.com has quite a distinct proposition to its users, it heroes search as the main ‘find’ strategy both in placement and in volume (It’s turned up loud in the information hierarchy). It is quite clearly a business directory and is best interrogated using a structured query.

Conversely your typical search engine such as the mighty Google offers users a natural language text field where they can put in anything they like. It does however allow you to choose from the indices across the top which starts to focus the user and build their query. We’ll discuss ‘Query Formulation’ in part 3.

(incidentally - I’ll tell you why I think Google isn’t a great search user experience, and the ways in which it could be improved significantly later - Grand claim, I know, but bear with me).

Brand:
The brand is also important when trying to understand how users build a mental model for what they can do on a site. Again as an example, Yell.com is a business directory and users visit the site to obtain business information. The Yell brand helps users to structure a query as they formulate a mental model of how they will find something (any combination of a business name, classification or location).

For a site such as Amazon, ‘a large product catalogue’ users and so search will obviously be a key device in finding specific items, many of the products searched for on Amazon are ‘uniquely identifiable’ – they can be described quite specifically; artist and album for example.

We will need to assess the affect of both brand and placement in order to try and ascertain exactly how users perceive the search tools.

This stage is a bit lame, but it does have an affect on what user think of your site. I’ve seen this time and again in search usability sessions and have come to realise that brand and placement have a significant affect on the interpretation of search.
Stages 3 - 8 are as follows:

2) Personalisation
3) Query Formulation
4) Error Prevention and Correction
5) Browsing Results
6) Refining Results
7) Discovering More

Oh My.

I saw this on Cool Hunters today, what a sneaker store! Please bring one to London, only make it sell New Balance 574s, 574s and 860s and save me going all the way to Flimby in Cumbria to the factory outlet for super-cheap sneaks.

Oh.. it’s Babe. Damn it.

Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days, I’ve been preparing for a pitch for a ‘large media client’, more later if we win it. Anyway, that coupled with preparing for our new arrival at Hutchinson towers, I’ve been a busy boy lately.

Eitherway, I have a distraction from all things sensible tonight as my old mate Fosta has had a brain wave to race for the grandly named Serpentine Trophy every year by seeing who can make the best time going from Hyde Park corner to the gate and back. The distance is about 1.4 miles which is just far enough to stop you hammering it all the way, but long enough to burn you out if you are going too quickly.

The event is a collection of late-twenty / early-thirty somethings racing their bikes just likes kids used to when they were 13 years old. We’re meeting after work tonight in Hyde Park, London, and I’ll be racing on my Dahon Speed Pro and I’ll be flipping my handlebars to ‘race mode’. But I’m disadvantaged from the off - what with my wheels being 16″ and requiring more from me to go fast.

I’m hoping that Fosta will be racing his BMX, but I bet he’s on his shiny new ‘hybrid’.

Results tomorrow.

Started in 2003, the London Design Festival is on again between the 15th and 30th September. Events are being held all over town across the two weeks and will visit over 150 different locations.

So there’s some good design coming your way, so get out there and see it. That is unless you decide to go see the Bad Design Amnesty where you can take your own exhibits, which is apparently followed by a book.

I think Design - Protect it or Forget it! looks interesting which is about Anti Copying In Design (ACID), particularly as I work at a place that’s absolutely rubbish at registering designs and filing patents and also thet my Father-in-law is n IP lawyer.

Then of course, there’s 100% Design and 100% Norway which are a good punt.

I’ve been working as an interaction designer for about 10 years now and over that time I’ve spent a large apart of it working on search related projects, the bulk of which are from my time at Yell.com. That’s obviously client side, but in my agency and management consultancy time I’ve also worked on retail search tools, health library search tools and location based search tools to mention a few sub-genres.

When you work across an area such as search for such a while you develop some mental models as to how people think about it, and I use these mental models to explain my design rationale to clients time and again.

One of my current projects is another outing for my ‘7 Stages of Search Experience’ which maps the constituent factors of any find and discovery journey and dismantles the user experience into 7 main activities.

The model starts with 3 mental models that run across the 7 stages and these mental models illustrate the variety of information needs people have when embarking on a find and discovery journey.

As it’s a fairly weighty topic, I’m going to add these as seperate posts over the next week or so, but first I’ll start with the 3 mental models that users bring to a search experience.

When users are engaging with a site, be it a search engine, portal, site search or potentially even a mapping or location based service, they invariably bring one of 3 mental models to the table.

Model One: Known-item Searches
This is when the user is trying to locate single answer to a single question. The example I always use is ‘What is the capital of Poland?’ This question has one answer and the user doesn’t need to do anymore ‘digging’ beyond seeing the answer, perhaps presented within the search engine results page (SERP).

The ’satisfaction criteria’ for this query is simply presentation of a coherent answer, there is an absence of preference for any type of data source or presentation format, simply a match and some consistency of the presented matches within the SERP is enough.

In this case, the user doesn’t actually need to leave the SERP, but if they do, it is probably only to visit one website. This is largely due to the fact that the way in which the answer is expressed is irrelevant and the solution is usually always rooted in fact.

Offline, this is where a user walks into a retail outlet and asks for something very specific - “I’d like a pair of black dress shoes to wear with a dinner suit please.”

Model Two: Exploratory Searches
These searches take place when the user has slightly more detailed satisfaction criteria and they want to explore more than one search result. A good example of this is a user trying to find a recipe of Thai Green Curry.

The search will result in number of matches and the user will have to choose which match suits their needs best. The result set will have multiple variations of largely the same thing but some will be from recognised sources, some will have clearer instructions and some will have illustrations. The user will select a match based on their particular satisfaction criteria and the selection of this result will vary from user to user.

Offline, this is where a user walks into a retail outlet and asks for something semi-specific - “I need to find something to wear for a job interview.”

Model Three: Exhaustive Searches
The last family of searches that users conduct are what I call Exhaustive Searches. Unlike the other two types of search explained so far, exhaustive searchers are looking for numerous pieces of information gathered around a theme or set of themes. These themes may branch into multiple sub-themes and lead on to a new set of queries.

The example I use for this is a user planning a summer vacation. Users will explore various locations, flight times, hotels, local attractions to visit and so on. Exploring any of these avenues has the potential to lead to a new line of enquiry. Flight times may not be suitable and therefore drive the selection of a new location.

The following example outlines a potential experience for someone looking to plan a holiday. An initial destination could be loosely defined at a country level, i.e. Italy. As the user progresses, the concept of travelling to Italy may sharpen to a particular region, town or even hotel. Along this journey other branches may stem from the paradigm, growing the user experience into a number of interrelated concepts.
Offline, this is where a user walks into a retail outlet and has no detailed requirements - “I’m just browsing thanks.”

3 Models, 7 Stages

These mental models are yet to play out across 7 stages. Here are the stages that will be described in more deatil over the next week or so:

1. The Search Proposition
2. Personalisation and Customisation
3. Query Formulation
4. Error Prevention, Disambiguation and Correction
5. Browsing Result Sets
6. Manipulating Result Sets
7. Discovering More, Theme Building