VIA Interaction

Monday, February 04, 2008

Passive Advanced Search

Google is experimenting with new ways of displaying search results: a map view, a timeline view and an information view.

Search is difficult from a customer experience perspective. Everyone loves the Google standard: enter in just about anything into a simple text box and get just what you want near the top of the results page.

Advanced search is harder. People, even technically inclined people, don't have much luck with it, and non technically inclined don't like those advanced search interfaces.

I like introducing advanced searches passively: Clicking and sorting to refine queries. That's what eBay does when it shows you categories next to your results. You are able to reduce the results to a more pertinent set by clicking a category. That's a far cry from the ERIC and LexisNexis days of "television AND sony and size=32-39."

It is counterintuitive to think that adding steps is better than providing an advanced user interface that enables you to form the query you want right off the bat. But the passive approach works better (in my opinion) because it enables you to present choices in plain English and the single-step process provides immediate and effective feedback about the results of those choices.

Google will help everyone in two ways -- it has a track record for creating easy to use interfaces, and its popularity means that people will be exposed to the new ways of searching. We will all benefit.

posted by Tim Beidel at 2/04/2008 11:26:00 AM

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