[Sigia-l] search interface as IA

[Eric Scheid]

My local newspaper can be found at http://www.smh.com.au/
Every now and then I mistype and get http://www.smh.com/

Normally, when I'm looking to read the local news from Sydney, Australia I'm
just unlikely to be interested in viewing the glossy front end to the
Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Life's like that.

I also live in a building named Serendipity.

Quick, go take a look at the http://www.smh.com/ website ... they've almost
completely done away with having a "main navigation" conceptual framework.
You access their entire website content via a search interface. I say
"almost" because you'll also see a popup menu of "destinations", which map
closely to what would have been their top level navigation. The advantage to
using a pop up menu is that they can have longer titles for each choice,
whereas if they were spatially placed buttons in a main navigation button
grid they'd be very very cramped.

At first I thought the search thing was just a front page gimmick, and once
I progressed past that then the usual main-nav structures would appear.
Turns out though that they don't. The left-nav column stays the same with
just the two elements: a search box and a destinations pop-up.

I'm guessing that for their intended audience it's important not to
overwhelm with a very cluttered interface.

It also appears they are doing a bets bets search results thing. There would
be (say) a dozen titled links against a particular category (love the
extended description of each category btw), and sometimes a "more >>" link.
The 'more' link leads to a more mundane search results list. Take a look to
see what I mean.

e.

minor nit: the search box is labelled "Refine your search", but it doesn't
actually "refine" any previous search.