[finders] Christina Wodtke: A Quick Word

[finders at findability.org]

June 3, 2008: Christina Wodtke: A Quick Word

http://www.findability.org/archives/000212.php

I talked with Christina Wodtke about Search Patterns. Christina moves fast
and wears many hats including Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn, Founder
of Cucina Media, Publisher of Boxes & Arrows, and author of Blueprints for
the Web. Plus, she co-founded the IA Institute and led the ux design group
at Yahoo! responsible for the revival of search and the reinvention of
shopping.

Christina believes search is perfect for patterns because behavior is fairly
stable and predictable. As she noted in Long Tails and Short Queries, the
patterns observed by Amanda Spink in 1997 haven't changed much. For
instance, most web queries are still short, 2 to 3 terms, and include little
refinement.

In that context, query disambiguation is incredibly hard, and the challenge
can be summed up as: "one more word!" How do we entice users to share just a
little more about their intent? Clearly Search Assist is an attempt to do
just that. Christina also noted that "size matters!" Approaches that work
for web search may not work for site search, and vice versa. For instance,
Best Bets won't scale for web search (though Wikipedia and Mahalo sorta aim
to fill that gap).

Finally, Christina was generous enough to share some unpublished writing
she's done on the topic of search. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

* Fast and ugly is better than slow and pretty.

* Scan time is as important as load time.

* If you want to see how hummingbirds fly, you'll have a hard time. They
move so fast they become a blur. But, if you ask them to slow down, they
can't stay aloft, and you won't learn anything...search is so fast, that if
the user is forced to think [e.g., in a usability test], they slow down too
much and behave unnaturally.

* With search, the physical actions are few: look, type, click. What you
really want to know is hidden, even from the person searching.

Thanks Christina, for slowing down for moment, to share your search
insights!