Experience Planner

My inbox was all a buzz today about the new Cuil search engine that launched, masterminded by ex-Google engineers, that, according to reports, boasts a search index that’s three times higher than Google’s. So I spent a little time checking it out.

You can tell right away Cuil looks much prettier than Google. But when you look past the pretty dressing, what do you get?

I was underwhelmed as I looked more closely at my search results. While I see the potential, the design does not lead your eye around the page to understand the hierarchy of the search results. And I missed Google’s “Did you mean … ” feature when I misspelled common search terms on Cuil. And there isn’t an “Advanced Search” feature to be found.

And while Cuil is promoting the quanity of pages they index, they are falling below Google on quality. The search results for some of the brand names I searched on appeared to be relevant, but as I went on to search lesser known terms, I got irrelevant results.

I do really like Cuil’s Explore by Category section to suggest related searches, and the tabs at the top do help narrow your search. These are great features that are easy to use.

As Google said themselves, it’s great to see more competition come into the search space. And I do like that Cuil is more concerned about user privacy. I’m looking forward to the competition pushing the industry to keep getting better.

In a recent post, James Kalbach says that people notice more on your website when browsing than searching.  In fact, a study showed that people visited 10 times as many non-targeted content pages when browsing.  62% of users who used category links continued looking after they found targeted content as opposed to 20% who continued looking after using search. 

Another study found that test subjects who were asked to explore a site as they wished performed better on recognition and recall tests than subjects who were asked to search for specific information. 

James says:

“People prefer information that involves sequence. They like to browse. Navigation provides a narrative for the people to follow on the Web. It tells a story–the story of your site. In this respect, there is something both familiar and comforting about web navigation. The widespread, seemingly natural use of navigation to access content on the Web reflects its strength as a narrative device.”

As the canvas shrinks the design challenge grows. IMO designing for small screens is among the most difficult of experience design challenges. Nokia recently published a short report detailing 10 examples of good design for mobile screens. Download the PDF here. They do a nice job of highlight experiences that find the critical balance between visual design, ease-of-use, and interactivity.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about leveraging of user data recently.
Actually, to be more specific, I’ve been thinking about how to add value and one possible method is to leverage user data (data you already have).

When I say user data I’m thinking about three things:

1. User Generated Data
2. User Imported Data
3. Captured Data (i.e. user account data, analytics, tracking, etc.)

There are probably better categories out there but this entire idea needs to be fleshed out more anyway…

Anywho,

Let’s start trying to use our data to provide some added value. Finding new ways to use data you already have can breathe life into an older digital ecosystem or it might allow one to build a whole new system (stand alone or complementary).

Maybe you already have what you need to make a good site into a GREAT one. Maybe, you just have to look and start planning for it. I’m thinking that talking to your measurement/research team is the logical first step.

I’m thinking that the backend has to do all of the heavy lifting, if the user needs to do most of the work then the new feature, the new site, etc. will not be sustainable in the long run.

Maybe I shouldn’t say leveraging user data, maybe it’s leveraging user input
Or
Maybe it’s more about add value and the different ways to do that

Still, i’m just thinking “out loud” at the moment

One caveat:
Emergent Properties

Examples:

Take Last.FM for example, for the SXSW conference they created a system that took their user’s music preferences and allowed them to filter through the SXSW music lineup. Last.FM also rolled out an “event calendar” of sorts that looks for music in your area that meets your musical tastes (as well as it can). Those are great value adds for an already strong site.

Group Recipes - food/cooking/recipe community
Different browse options (e.g. beauty, intereresting, stumbler, local; eateries), Roger the recipe robot, friend “recommender” - all based on the community’s input

Ravelry - knit and crochet community
Popular patterns, project finder (based on type of yarn and other attributes), flickr integration, public project tracking (what are people working on), project and resource tracking (e.g. needles, hooks, and yarn), pattern browser - all based on user behaviour and input

Facebook
Facebook introduced the ability to import friends from a myriad of different web applications and address books - is it a good thing? That’s another post but it did leverage User Data (albeit the fact that the data came from another site/application) - user initiated import

Etsy
Search by colour - based on user tagging

There was a review site a few months ago that had a really interesting navigation system. You could browse by a taxonomy and then refine results based on a folksonomy. Seemed like a great idea. I need to find that site again!

This blog is the work of the Experience Planning team at Bridge Worldwide. We’re using this blog as a forum to share our thoughts, experiences, and questions about the practice of user experience planning.

To celebrate our new blog, we’ve created a t-shirt that we think suits our profession really well. How many times per week should you wear it? It depends.

Check back with us soon. Tomorrow is opening day for the Reds and for us.