Category: search

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UX-LX: Talks on Digital Harm and Understanding Searcher Behavior

User Experience Lisbon 2023

In May, I was invited to speak at UX Lisbon, on Preventing Digital Harm in Online Spaces. At the main event, I presented the Internet Safety Lab’s framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and what we can do as designers to mitigate the digital harms and dark patterns that could potentially violate that relationship. You can download my presentation below.

Download the PDF

On the first day of the event, I ran a half-day, pre-conference workshop titled “Designing Effective Search Strategies” in which I introduced a new framework using observation as a powerful tool to understand site search behavior. To explore this, we broke into seven groups and worked on creating empathy maps, search personas (including group personas) and mapping the user journey toward information discovery. As a takeaway, all participants received a toolkit for crafting these artifacts and a step-by-step process to enhance product search. We got to eat yummy Portuguese snacks, too!

Lisbon Convention Center

“Noreen … made the interesting point that if we build an accessible design we’ll also be solving many search problems.”

— UXLx: UX Lisbon

What a wonderful event, interesting and welcoming people and an absolutely unforgettable time!

I am available to teach your team mitigating digital harm as a solo facilitator or how to understand user search behavior, solo or with my colleagues at the Information Architecture Gateway. Let me know if we can help.

Read the UXLX Write-ups at Medium:

UXLX 2023 Wrap Up: Workshops

UXLX 2023 Wrap Up: Talks Day

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Calm Down. Wikipedia is Not Planning to Compete with Google.

I am reading and rereading the discussion/controversy/hype/reporting on Wikipedia’s knowledge engine and wondering exactly what about it should be construed as a direct competitor to Google. Yes. An unbiased, independent, not tied to corporate interests search engine, but of what content? Wikipedia’s, most likely. Surely not all of the internet, since their own data and articles are continually vetted for independence and would provide a test for bias.

Wikipedia’s leaked grant proposal indicates that there is a concern that content delivered by Google search results that originates from Wikipedia is obviating the need to click through to a Wikipedia page, therefore reducing the number of users that might see WMF’s donation pitch and thereby reducing it’s revenues. But if the Knowledge Engine is really just a better way to search Wikipedia content then it seems to be more an effort to keep users on the Wikipedia site by providing better access to search and discovery of Wikipedia articles. But if you are expecting people to start at Wikipedia to use the search engine (or whatever landing page Wikipedia creates), you still have the problem of getting them there. (FWIW, when I find a Wikipedia article on Google or even a bit of information generated from Wikipedia I often if not usually continue on to the Wikipedia article. I may just be an encyclopedia geek, but encyclopedia geeks are the ones making contributions to Wikipedia in the first place.)

Another concern I have heard is that somehow this Knowledge Engine will reduce the need for curated content. Again, this seems to be alarmist. Wikipedia content, whether in the form of articles or data, is submitted and curated by Wikipedia Editors. What “content” would the Knowledge Engine search if not for the content developed and curated by editors? From what I saw of the proposal it didn’t look like the Knowledge Engine was intended to piece together discovery from the wild, but from Wikipedia’s own content. And even if there was an attempt to deliver content from the wild, the best way to evaluate it for bias would be to compare it to the curated content.
What am I missing?

UPDATE (2016/02/16 4:34pm): And the response from Wikipedia (found almost immediately after I added my post):

Clarity on the future of Wikimedia search « Wikimedia blog

“What are we not doing? We’re not building a global crawler search engine. We’re not building another, separate Wikimedia project….Despite headlines, we are not trying to compete with other platforms, including Google. As a non-profit we are noncommercial and support open knowledge. Our focus is on the knowledge contributed on the Wikimedia projects. ”

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IA Institute Newsletter #6.05 Released

I am almost finished with the NYC Digital Roadmap and will have a blog post coming soon. In the meantime, there is a lot of new publications on Information Architecture. Put this on your nightstand, bring it to the beach or carry it on the metro, cause we’ve got reading to do:

IA Institute just released Newsletter #6.05 with Part Two of Finding IA at the Enterprise Search Summit by Shari Thurow, a follow up to my article from the previous newsletter.

http://iainstitute.org/news/001263.php

The Journal of Information Architecture released Issue 1, Volume 3 with a focus on the unique way of seeing what Jorge Arango terms “Environments for Understanding” and how they persist across channels and media.

http://journalofia.org

Also the long awaited IA issue of the ASIS%T Bulletin is out:

http://www.asis.org/bulletin.html

And if that’s not enough, here’s an inspiring blog post on “Information Architecture,” building bridges and making maps from Peter Morville:

http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000647.php

I’ve got a lot of reading to do….

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Finding IA at the Enterprise Search Summit

(this article originally appeared at iainstitute.org on June 20, 2011)

Last month in May, I had the pleasure of attending the Enterprise Search Summit East in New York City with IA Institute board member, Shari Thurow. Shari and I were on a quest to discover the role of information architecture in Enterprise Search. We didn’t have to look too far, as both days were keynoted by IA Institute veterans: former IA Institute president and CEO of FatDux, Eric Reiss, on Day 1 and IA Institute founder and Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., Thomas Vander Wal, on Day 2 . Institute founder Bev Corwin was also in attendance and I quite was pleased to make a personal connection with a former coworker from PricewaterhouseCoopers, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years.

In Reiss’s keynote, “The Dumbing Down of Intelligent Search,” he challenged search professionals to have the user, not the application, serve as the frame of reference for search. Using Google as an example, Eric showed how the algorithm may not provide the correct context. Those who build the algorithm need to ensure that contextual metadata is available in the CMS. Eric also challenged implementers to understand the business and educate the content providers of those needs. “Matching patterns is not the same as matching needs,” he explained. And lest the users themselves forget their own power, Eric encourages all users to be critical and experiment, learn basic strategies and not to take for granted that the search solution is intelligent.

Thomas Vander Wal’s keynote on Day 2, “The Search for Social,” was a fitting bookend, showing how to deal with all the input once your Enterprise Search team has embraced the user. VanderWal described tools that go beyond searching for artifacts such as documents, emails and image/video content to searching for human resources, knowledge and expertise within the enterprise. Many presenters demonstrated social search tools for finding user profiles, activity streams and Yahoo! Answers-style knowledgebases.


A Common Theme

IA/UX was a prominent theme. Throughout the conference we noted terminology from the information architecture/user experience umbrella nestled within discussion of ECM, SEO, text mining, predictive analytics, policy and governance. Terms like information glut, findability, folksonomy, facets, and rich semantics, as well as a big focus on the user experience.

A major concern in the Enterprise Search community is the question of what exactly is new in search these days? Reiss noted that there has been no major new search engine since Google launched in 1998. Google Search Appliance and Microsoft Sharepoint are still dominant. According to a panel of experts moderated by Martin White, called “The Renaissance of Search,” Enterprise Search has been running on autopilot for a long time and is only now finding innovation coming from places like mobile and social technologies. Panelist Alan Pelz-Sharp of Real Story Group said that consolidation around a product (Google, for example) does not equal maturity of a discipline. Panelist Hadley Reynolds of IDC, pointing to the now established mobile platform, said that the Google model is not ideal for mobile apps. For example, “A playlist model would work better for mobile search applications,” he said. Innovative thinking around search for mobile should be a growth area.

As stated above, user experience was a huge theme at the conference. Panelist Lynda Moulton of The Gilbane Group highlighted improvement in user experience as a major new effort in Enterprise Search. She said that semantic technologies have been built on artificial intelligence platforms and wondered if it will “disappear like AI” or if they just need better UX packaging.

Focus on the user was refreshing but also pointed to a challenge. A theme I found running through many presentations was the sense that after 15 years, the Enterprise Search field is not marketing itself well as a discipline, both to business management and to the users themselves who benefit from search. Search managers feel they have to continually explain the value of search to users, which ”