[finders] Interview: Tom Chi

[finders at findability.org]

May 21, 2008: Interview: Tom Chi

http://www.findability.org/archives/000209.php

I talked with Tom Chi about Search Patterns. As senior director of user
experience at Yahoo!, Tom led last year's major redesign of Yahoo! Search
which featured the launch of Search Assist.

Search Assist has two components. First, auto-complete identifies when users
need search suggestions by measuring typing speed and responding to
hesitations. This feature has dramatically reduced the number of misspelled
queries. Second, auto-suggest identifies related concepts, and helps users
to move forward (refine), backward (expand), and sideways (related).

Tom explained that this innovation resulted from careful analysis of user
behavior and psychology. Their studies showed searchers hadn't become more
sophisticated over the past five years, and that users often blamed
themselves for poor results. By studying the ways users fail, Tom's team saw
an opportunity to help users make the query smarter, one simple step at a
time.

This was clearly a good move. Since launching Search Assist, Yahoo! has seen
significant improvements in user satisfaction, and a 61% increase in
successful task completion. And, in a recent Keynote Benchmark study, Yahoo!
took first place in the search assistance category.

Tom noted that thinking creatively about how you define the problem is
essential to innovation. There are conspicuous opportunities (e.g., social,
multimedia, ubiquitous access), but we must also seek the less obvious
possibilities (e.g., making search invisible).

He finds inspiration in such works as Edward O. Wilson's The Diversity of
Life. As Tom noted "any system, as it becomes more complex, approximates a
biological system." That's an intriguing perspective for someone tasked with
inventing the future of search. Good luck Tom!