hiding our collections in plain site: interface strategies for findability
DESCRIPTION
A recent redesign of the collection search interface for an on-line art education tool (ArtsConnectEd.org) has provided an opportunity to compare usage patterns between the two versions. In this paper I first survey current search interface design patterns, then discuss the new interface, the log cleanup and analysis, and finally present evidence-based recommendations that may be applied to the general problem of presenting large collections on-line.TRANSCRIPT
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Hiding our Collections in Plain Site
Interface Strategiesfor Findability
(see speaker notes for context)
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Nate Solas (@homebrewer)
Webmaster at the Walker Art Center
Today:
The problem
The numbers
Recommendations
Beyond the interface
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ArtsConnectEd 1 (ACE1)
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What do the logs tell us about how this interface is used?id timestamp term # user agent
187710 2008-04-28 12:03:21.043
fire 53 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187711 2008-04-28 12:03:22.123
tropical beaches Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187712 2008-04-28 12:03:26.233
water 148 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
187713 2008-04-28 12:03:27.170
nature and animals
25 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
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Term Frequency
photographs 734
paintings 413
sculpture 275
arts 263
ceramics 169
pattern 156
photograph 150
landscape 123
masks 121
children 112
Top search terms in ACE 1
trying to browse?
part of an assignment?
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"Term Facets"
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Facet
Other
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Artist names are big, then medium, and finally culture
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Recovering session information (simplified)
Timestamp Term User Agent Session
1:10:01pm horse Firefox 3 1
1:10:45pm pony Firefox 3 1
1:12:22pm flower IE 7 2
1:30:12pm gallop Firefox 3 3
1:31:42pm portrait Firefox 3.5 4
1:33:08pm portrait Firefox 3 3
EFF showed user agent usually contains enough unique information to identify a user out of 1,500 others.
Combined with 3-minute session window = good enough.
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Browsing the collection, circa 1990
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Facet
Other
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Coverage of the collection
+20% +100%
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Time on site: easy to measure, hard to understand
Is your interface inviting deeper exploration, or is it just taking them forever to figure it out?
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Still typing facet terms into the search box?
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Recommendations
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Prevent dead ends
You Should
Tell users (133)
How many (826)
Results (0)
To expect (26)
Bad Design
Makes
Them guess
What's behind
Each door
3x moredead ends!
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Explain the "no results" page
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Suggest speling spelling
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Beyond the interface
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No search engine can crawl this site
... unless you provide a sitemap
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SEO+
Crawlable site+
Sitemap
=
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Buzzword Bingo!
• microdata• microformats• RDFa
• Linked Open Data
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The end.
All Stormtrooper photos via CC license at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/
Pic. of baby with book: by me