Experiencing Information

If you haven’t seen Peter Morville’s collection of search interfaces on flickr, check them out.

In Designing Web Navigation, I have a whole chapter on integrating search and browse. The point is that from a user’s perspective navigating and searching aren’t different things. People just want to find information. And we know from berrypicking theory that people can switch their seeking strategies rapidly while looking for information online.

Google introduced Sitelinks in their search results back in 2006. These are automatically generated based on an analysis of the target site’s structure. Often, the links naturally reflect the main navigation options of the site. With this, the scenario is: you do a search on Google, and from the results can directly navigate the target site. (BTW, the introduction of Sitelinks is another good reason to make sure your site is well structured and has a meaningful navigation system.)

Recently, Google also introduced a site search features embedded right in the results list:

So now the scenario is: do a keyword search on Google, browse the results list which includes navigation from target sites, and now you can even do a keyword search on specific site. The line between search and browse is really blurred here. And that’s a good thing, I believe.

Viewdle offers a cool, new technology: face recognition search. From the site:

“Viewdle automatically looks inside the video, frame-by-frame, to create a real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.”

Looks like it’s pretty accurate, too. Reuters labs is apparently trying this out.  See for yourself…

Chris Voss and Leonieke Zomerdijk of the London Business School released a long-ish paper back in June 2007 about the role of customer experience in designing innovative services. See the full report online: Innovation in Experiential Services: An Empirical View (pdf).

They looked case-based field studies from nearly 100 companies (mostly in the UK and US) since 2003. From the executive summary:

“The research found that experiential services are often designed from the perspective of the customer journey rather than as a single product or transaction; the service is seen as a journey that spans a longer period of time and consists of multiple components and multiple touchpoints. The journey perspective implies that a customer experience is built over an extended period of time, starting before and ending after the actual sales experience or transaction. During a customer journey, numerous touchpoints occur between the customer and the organisation or the brand. These touchpoints need to be carefully designed and managed. The research shows that innovation takes place at each of these touchpoints as well as of the overall journey itself.”

Of course, the journey view of customer service puts the customer at the center of attention and not the technology (as with many traditional innovation perspectives). And the journey perspective is broader in scope since it essentially can look at any touchpoint between the customer and service.

How do you get the right journey perspective? Like many of the successful innovators in the study, you should go out an observe people:

“With regard to the process of innovation in experiential services, the research revealed that many innovations were driven by detailed insights into customers. Both design and consultancy firms and experiential service providers invested a large amount of time and effort in conducting research leading to insights in customers’ behaviour, needs and preferences. Common techniques were traditional market research, empathic research to understand customers at an emotional level, trend watching and learning from companies in different industries. This indicates that experiential innovations are typically customer rather than technology driven.”

Check out the full study. It’s not short, but written fairly straightforward in accessible language.

Paul Sherman has a good article in UX Matters called Where’s My Stuff? Beyond the Nested Folder Metaphor. It includes a video of the Bumptop Interface, which was developed by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. See the video of the interface on YouTube or more information on the Bumptop website, including a video from TED 2007. I came across this about a year and half ago, but forgot the name of the interface. So I was thankful to have come across it again on UX Matters.

The YouTube video of the Bumptop interface begins with an interesting thesis:

“In real work spaces, documents are piled and casually arranged in a way that subtly conveys information to the owner. This expressiveness is lost in today’s GUI desktop.”

In my ethnographic studies, this is something I’ve directly observed to be true in the law domain. Legal information workers implicitly use piles and location to manage workflow. Piles of client files around the office are essentially physical to-do lists. At a glance, they convey who has what amount of work to do and when. Other physical attributes of paper documents support this type of workflow management, such as color and size and additional flags sticking out of the sides of books and folders.

Converting this intuitive, organic way of working to an online system is difficult. You lose an overview quickly. Even with two computer monitors, it’s hard to get the same kind of spatial horizontal-ness you can easily achieve with paper documents. Online workflow management also requires a great amount of discipline: you must rigorously update information in order for the system to function. This, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle. The benefits of online document management and workflow management are in the long run perhaps higher, but the change needed to get there is quite large because it requires a fundamental change in behavior.

In light of the iPhone and MS Surface and other similar interfaces, the Bumptop interface has potential, in my opinion. It’s a break-away from the tyranny of the typical GUI model. Not sure if Bumptop will solve the loss of expressiveness current desktop GUIs cause, but it pointing to thinking in the right direction…or at least in a different direction.

Johnny Chung Lee is a real creative person. Check out his hack of a Wii remote to get a “Minority Report” style of interaction. No real practical application shown, but it’s quite fascinating nonetheless.

I previously blogged about Gapminder and Hans Roslings talk at TED demonstrating this tool. I learned that you can see more eye-opening visualizations on a regular basis with GapCasts, a video blog from Hans and Co. These short videos really show the potential power of information visualizations in enhancing understanding.

One thing I noticed though, is that without a speaker explaining the visualizations, they wouldn’t make too much sense. Or least it would take a while to figure out what they really mean. So, the real challenge of info viz is in the interpretation of the graphs and charts, not in creating the visualizations. But how can a visualization be so self-explanatory that anyone can immediately understand what it’s really saying?