[Sigia-l] ROI/Value of Search Engine Design - Resources?

[Jared M. Spool]

Peter Merholz observed:

> > We've heard the bad (e.g., UIE's reports on how when people use
> > search, they tend to fail at the task at hand).

Then Boniface Lau replied:

>I take that with a big grain of salt.

I agree completely with Boniface. I would highly recommend that everyone 
take everything we write with a grain of salt. Don't accept any of it as 
unbridled truth and don't let anything we say go unquestioned.

The results we report come from tests in our labs or in the field with our 
researchers. We do the best we can to isolate variables, but this is hard 
to do, no matter how sophisticated the research techniques are. We haven't 
tested every possible condition, so what happens in our testing might not 
be happening on your site.

Designers should observe what's going on with their own designs and see if 
it matches our results. If it does, our work should be useful in explaining 
the observations and pointing out alternatives that could help with any 
obstacles. If their observations don't match our results, well, they've 
found one of the many exceptions that are going to happen when a field is 
young and so much is unknown.

Boniface also wrote:

>For example, the UIE report at:
>
>     http://www.uie.com/Articles/why_amazon_succeeds.htm
>
>criticizes Amazon's search capability on electronic products. But the
>cited example "DVD player" worked much better than what the report
>suggested.

In that article (or anywhere else, for that fact), we never stated that the 
query 'DVD Player' doesn't produce useful results. At least, we didn't 
intend to state that. We thought we only stated that it's a different type 
of query than when someone is shopping for a book or a DVD. My apologies if 
we weren't clear in our original explanation.

Jared

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

Don't miss User Interface 7 West, March 23-27, Burlingame, CA. 
http://www.uiconf.com