Last month, I put a call out to all user experience folks in Richmond to see if anyone was interested in a meetup. I couldn’t believe the response. There were about 25 people at the first Richmond User Experience (RUX) meeting - folks were from a wide variety of disciplines including information architecture, interaction design, human factors and libraries. It was great! Last night we met again at the Wine Barrel Thief (an AWESOME wine shop). Last night’s group was a bit smaller, however it was quite lively - we had some really great conversations on topics ranging from a recap of this year’s IxDA conference in Savannah to the information architecture profession in general to web development standards. Thanks to all in attendance. I’m really looking forward to our next meeting. If you’re in Richmond or the surrounding area, join us!
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I’ve been intrigued by how people search the Web for quite a while. I started researching this subject when I was earning my graduate degree at UNC in Information Science. At the time, I was interested in how prior knowledge of a collection worked to inform search behaviors. Since that time, I have focused more on understanding how the Web is affecting user search habits. For example, how much has Google and other search engines influenced user search behaviors on library Web sites? Should academic libraries incorporate search engines to search their online collections? What is an ideal search interface for disparate library collections?
A leading information scientist, Dr. Amanda Spink, has studied information and Web retrieval for years. I’m eager to get her latest book, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Information Science and Knowledge Management, that she co-edited it with Michael Zimmer. I’m hoping that it offers some answers to my questions about how online search engines have influenced user behaviors.
Amazon.com recently reviewed the book and has this to say:
This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas about Web searching. They examine the various roles and impacts of Web searching on the social, cultural, political, legal, and informational spheres of our lives, such as the impact on individuals, social groups, modern and postmodern ways of knowing, and public and private life. By critically examining the issues, theories, and formations arising from, and surrounding, Web searching, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives represents an important contribution to the emerging multidisciplinary body of research on Web search engines.
Taking Web search a step further to the practical elements of design is Peter Morville, who also studies online search behaviors. His forthcoming book should be quite fascinating - I’m sure it will be as great as Ambient Findability, one of my favorites. He has recently created a flickr collection of Web search patterns & examples in preparation for the book. Morville has organized the collection by categories - search for libraries, vertical layout, faceted navigation and many more. Check it out.
This is my first post on this new blog - See ‘About’ for more information about me and the intent of the blog.
I’ll use this first post to highlight a wonderful chart from Business Week, June, 2007, that just came to my attention via the blog, userslib.com. The chart visually describes who participates online and what they are doing there. Since I am in Generation X, I focused on that category first. It’s quite interesting that almost half of us (41%) are online spectators! Why aren’t we joining social networking sites? The other interesting set of data in the chart is the ‘collectors,’ or those who use RSS and tag information. The highest percentage is only 18% from Generation Y. From a library perspective we spend an incredible amount of time blogging and providing RSS feeds for our users. This makes me question whether folks are really reading our blog. Maybe they are reading but not subscribing?
