hiding our collections in plain site: interface strategies for findability
DESCRIPTION
A recent redesign of the collection search interface for an on-line art education tool (ArtsConnectEd.org) has provided an opportunity to compare usage patterns between the two versions. In this paper I first survey current search interface design patterns, then discuss the new interface, the log cleanup and analysis, and finally present evidence-based recommendations that may be applied to the general problem of presenting large collections on-line.TRANSCRIPT
Hiding our Collections in Plain Site
Interface Strategiesfor Findability
(see speaker notes for context)
Nate Solas (@homebrewer)
Webmaster at the Walker Art Center
Today:
The problem
The numbers
Recommendations
Beyond the interface
ArtsConnectEd 1 (ACE1)
What do the logs tell us about how this interface is used?id timestamp term # user agent
187710 2008-04-28 12:03:21.043
fire 53 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187711 2008-04-28 12:03:22.123
tropical beaches Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187712 2008-04-28 12:03:26.233
water 148 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187713 2008-04-28 12:03:27.170
nature and animals
25 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Term Frequency
photographs 734
paintings 413
sculpture 275
arts 263
ceramics 169
pattern 156
photograph 150
landscape 123
masks 121
children 112
Top search terms in ACE 1
trying to browse?
part of an assignment?
"Term Facets"
Facet
Other
Artist names are big, then medium, and finally culture
Recovering session information (simplified)
Timestamp Term User Agent Session
1:10:01pm horse Firefox 3 1
1:10:45pm pony Firefox 3 1
1:12:22pm flower IE 7 2
1:30:12pm gallop Firefox 3 3
1:31:42pm portrait Firefox 3.5 4
1:33:08pm portrait Firefox 3 3
EFF showed user agent usually contains enough unique information to identify a user out of 1,500 others.
Combined with 3-minute session window = good enough.
Browsing the collection, circa 1990
Facet
Other
Coverage of the collection
+20% +100%
Time on site: easy to measure, hard to understand
Is your interface inviting deeper exploration, or is it just taking them forever to figure it out?
Still typing facet terms into the search box?
Recommendations
Prevent dead ends
You Should
Tell users (133)
How many (826)
Results (0)
To expect (26)
Bad Design
Makes
Them guess
What's behind
Each door
3x moredead ends!
Explain the "no results" page
Suggest speling spelling
Beyond the interface
No search engine can crawl this site
... unless you provide a sitemap
SEO+
Crawlable site+
Sitemap
=
Buzzword Bingo!
• microdata• microformats• RDFa
• Linked Open Data
The end.
All Stormtrooper photos via CC license at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/
Pic. of baby with book: by me