[Sigia-l] Fitts' Law gone crazy?

[Billie Mandel]

Agreed with Dmitry - the results are a bit off (insufficient stemming,
for one - "pattern" and "patterns" should not have such divergent
results). 

Putting aside the "is Big too big" question (which I don't feel
qualified to answer without watching a visually impaired user), the IA
decisions they've made for the results page are actually interesting to
me. Especially comparing it to a Google results page, on which most
assume they have already made minimalist IA design decisions.  

Big.com have translated "easier to read" into stripping the URLs down to
the domain only (who needs those pesky http's anyway?), and removing all
the related links to each result (Cached - Similar pages - Remove
result) that Google results have.  The Google results page feels
downright chaotic in comparison.  

Makes me wonder if Big.com did any research watching their target
audience try to use Google or other search engines - and to what extent
Google users are using those links (cached/similar/remove). 

- Billie

Information Architect
Openwave Systems Inc
billie.mandel at openwave.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Dmitry Nekrasovski
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 9:17 AM
To: Davezilla
Cc: Listera; SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Fitts' Law gone crazy?

Great accessibility-aware interface, terrible search result quality.
This should have been implemented as an alternative interface to
Google or another major search engine.

Dmitry