Devcon 2013: Understanding Search Behavior

Understanding Search Behavior:
Devcon 2014 Workshop

Spencer Tracey, Katherine Hepburn, and EMERAC
Librarians

Google page rank
Who’s Who vs. Citation Index

A language of search and discovery
How people search and the problems they
encounter have has to do with:
 Skills and knowledge
 Needs and goals
 Search context
UX Design research solves problems by:
 Understanding people
 Understanding how people think
 Understanding the search context

Dimensions of search experience
1st Dimension – user’s skill and knowledge
2nd Dimension – information seeking behavior
3rd Dimension – the search context
4th Dimension – modes of search & discovery

Dimensions of search experience

1st dimension: skill + knowledge
Understand how users skill and knowledge shape
how they use your products, the problems they
have, and how you can resolve those problems.

Skill using the tool
Remember:
They can be competent with technology,
just not your site or application

Domain novices:
 Overwhelmed by too much information
 Easily confused
 Difficulty judging relevance

Technical novices:
 Easily disoriented
 Distracted by demands of the search tools
 Use shallow pogosticking searches

Hub and spoke search pattern
SEARCH
RESULTS
Detail
Detail
Detail
DetailDetail
Detail
Detail

The orienteers (double novices)
 Reformulate queries often
 Look at fewer pages
 Use conservative queries
 Afraid to venture far afield
 Spend more time on task

Problems for double novices
 Make small, incremental changes to queries
 Difficulty evaluating results
 Don’t trust results
 Easily confused and disoriented

Needs are cognitive and emotional:
Cognitive
 Learning general strategies for using technology
 Learning how specific app or site works
 Learning domain terminology
Emotional
 Feeling distrustful of the app/site
 Feeling distrustful of the validity of search results
 Feeling afraid they’ll get lost
 Feeling afraid to take go down a different path

How to solve their problems?
1. Breadcrumbs
2. More like this / Related / Popular / Also viewed
3. Already searched
4. Scoped search
5. Auto correct and auto suggest
6. Tooltips
7. Tutorial Overlays

Breadcrumbs: history or hierarchy?

Design patterns for discovery
More like this / Related / Popular / Recommended

Advanced search design patterns?
(faceted search)

(search menus)

(advanced filtering)

Novice users
 Ignore advanced searching options
 Narrowly focused on understanding and
assessing
 Do not see search links, advanced search links
or icons
 Do not see faceted search panels in sidebars
 Faceted search tends to be used by more
advanced users

Double experts are teleporters
1. Formulate better queries
2. Make fewer query reformulations
3. Quicker to judge relevance
4. Look at more pages
5. Examine results more thoroughly

Problems for experts
 Frustrated by any slowness
 Frustrated by tools for novices
 Frustrated by inflexible search tools
 Frustrated by hard-to-find advanced search
 Clunky UI - Advanced search kitchen sinks:
- lack information hierarchy
- Over-emphasize visual design at expense of
information

How to solve their problems
1. Well designed advanced search menus
2. Faceted search (filter search results by facets)
3. Tooltips or animations to help users find
advanced tools
4. Make it possible to customize the UI to the
user’s behavior

In betweeners: Make the UI learnable
Learnability
The ease with which users gain awareness of features
Design patterns
1. Contextual instructions
2. Immersive, full-screen overlays
3. Visual design cues
4. Animation: magnetism – peep outs

2nd Dimension:
Information seeking behavior
“What we find, changes what we seek”

Old model
Information seeking as linear, static process

Information foraging
Information seeking as a journey: interactively
changes as we gather more knowledge

What we find changes what we seek

Information Foraging
Abundance of information + Limited energy =
 How much energy will it cost?
 What will I gain?
1.

Does a bear chase a biker in the woods?
1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKdRlWz-1pg

Information Foraging
1.
We go after patches of information, pick the best and move
on to another patch
We find and forage, pick the best and quickly move on

Information glut
1.
In a glut of information, users are quickly overwhelmed

Design for information foraging
Information scent: cues that help users decide what to do next

Information Scent
 Trigger words in natural, human language
 Descriptive phrases in links
 Long, descriptive titles for search list items, for
modules, and for sections
 Make sure links look clickable
 Search keyword or hit highlighting
 Visual design and layout for scanning

Information Scent
Strong = confident users who stick around
Weak = uncertain users who leave

Descriptive titles – Google SRP

Descriptive titles - Zillow Primary - all info here is primary,
scanned first by user
Secondary – this info is secondary in importa

Hit highlighting – (showing none)

homes for sale in Norfolk
Hit highlighting

Use clear labeling
 Group into user-centered categories
 Easy-to-remember labels and categories
 Natural language over numbers (city name >
ZIP)
 Natural language, not jargon

Grouping results @ Google
Paid Result
Organic Result
News
Reference
sources

Sensemaking
Once users have information, what next?

Putting it all together
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtJ-zyE3Uk&feature=youtu.be

Three models for sensemaking
 Shoebox or junk drawer
 Evidence file
 Schemas

Design patterns help with sensemaking
 Email to self/friends
 My account
 Wish lists
 Favorite or save listings
 Customized labeling and categories
 Social search

3rd dimension: context matters

User context shapes:
 How user thinks and feels
 What user sees and notices
 How user performs a search

Four Layers of Context
Cultural layer - what is the cultural context of the
search?

Work task - how does the task and user’s goals
influence searching behavior

Information seeking - user exercises judgment
about how, when, how long, and where to
search

Information retrieval formulating queries,
assessing results, and reformulating as needed

Contextual layers of gift shopping
Use a buyer’s guide

Scan search results to locate potential places to find

Locate potential gifts from the search results

Locating potential gifts from the search results
 Using PB’s search

1. Information retrieval layer: locating potential gifts from
the search results
 Using PB’s search

Cultural layer
1. Cultural layer:
Importance of gift
giving in wider
culture, sub-
culture, family,
organization,
even team within
an organization

Work task layer
One or more tasks that need to be accomplished
Wikihow guide to gift giving

User’s physical context of search

Physical context of search
 Mobile has renewed interest in topic
 Always been crucial to UX research
Different mobile searches by context: Google/Nielsen (March 2013).

Desktop and physical context
 More likely to take on different roles (work,
leisure, family, etc)
 Longer searching sessions
 Less likely to search locally

Mobile and physical context
 Driven by spatiotemporal context
 Short seeking sessions
 Very focused on specific tasks
 Tend to be location based
 Leads to a dynamic and flexible search
experience

A language of search and discovery
How people search and problems they have:
 Skills and knowledge
 Needs and goals
 Search context
UX Design research solves problems by:
 Understanding people
 Understanding how people think
 Understanding the search context

Given all this, we have opportunities
1. Search isn’t about individual, isolated queries
2. Search is a process with user skills and
knowledge improving along the way
3. Search always takes place in a context –
cultural, work task, physical
4. Opportunities to help users through the
entire search journey.
5. When we help people accomplish their goals,
they feel good about our brand and that’s a +
1 for us

Will – first time home buyer
 30s, married, one child +
 Preparing to retire from Navy
 Lives in East OV
 Looking for suburbs
 Wife, Kyla, USED TO handle
finances and home buying
 Kyla has significant say in the decision but lets
Will do adetail work.
 Will gathers options, shares them with her.
 Will is more interested in an investment

Desires
 To feel knowledgeable
 Good deal
 Agent that’s on their side
 “Property Virgin Lady”
 Wants to trust that results are for not biased to
the agent
 Wants an online version of a buyer’s agent
 Wants to trust results but tends to rely on friends
and neighbors for suggestions

Fears
 Agents
 Sales pressure
 Getting ripped off
 Missing deals
 Missing dream home
 Ovewhelmed by tradeoffs
 Am I doing the best search?

Context
Tends to search mostly at night
Uses a laptop – couple that shares the same
laptop.
 Doesn’t like to search on the go. They are
usually too busy to stop and look at a house.
Sometimes, they will drive by a house if it’s
nearby

Problems and dislikes
 Worries about validity and thoroughness of results
 Reformulating queries
 Too much information on page
 Dislikes how hard it is to tell one home from another. They all
start looking alike after awhile.
 Dislikes having to use multiple sites. Will use one search to
locate house, then Trulia to figure out what comparable prices
are.
 On other hand, concerned that a single site won’t have all the
information.
 Wants a way to search by school district. Uses Nancy Chandler
for school-based search.
 Wants to be able to narrow searches but tends not to because it’s
easier to scan through pages

Put me in control
“I want to feel like I know what
I’m doing.”
“It’s frustrating to find good
deals that they turn out to be
fake or there’s a catch.”
“I want it to be simpler. I spend a lot of time trying
to find good deals, but there’s so many results.
After awhile everything looks the same.”

Make it seem easy
“I just want a way to figure out what we
can afford. What neighborhoods are
good picks. You know?”
“I’d like to be able to punch choices into
a tool and get back a list of houses that
are a match. But all these web sites.
So many details. It’s too much.”
“I feel like I have to go through pages and pages.”

Make me feel smart
“What really surprised me was how,
even when it seems like they can
help you, they really don’t. I used
Navy Federal. But I still felt lost and
confused about where to start.”
“I’ve been to a seminar for first time buyers. But it was run by a
real estate agent. I didn’t trust I’d get the right information.”

Domain expert / Tool novice
1. Knowledgeable about domain
2. Good at evaluating content
3. Quickly perform in-depth research
4. May use hub and spoke search pattern as
crutch
Needs:
– design patterns that help user learn tool/technology
– design patterns to help orient user in search funnel

Domain novice / Tool expert
1. Good at manipulating search tools
2. Confident with the search process/tools – but
this can mask lack of domain knowledge
3. May find it difficult to evaluate relevance of
results
Needs
– design patterns to help gain domain knowledge
– UX design techniques to build trust

For more research-based insights
about our users, check out the UX
insights portal:
http://redacted.com
Thoughts? Questions?

Devcon 2013: Understanding Search Behavior

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