Let’s face it, many of us now receive more email that we can read. So if we’re not reading all our email, are we at least reading the most important messages? If you haven’t customized your email client, I doubt it. Most major email clients (e.g. Outlook) treat all messages the same and sort by…
Tag: search
Yahoo’s Elegant Interaction Design in Search
I read in Techcrunch about Yahoo!’s new improvements to search results. What caught my attention was how elegant the search suggestion widget operates. Unlike other search suggestion sites which annoyingly get in the way all the time with their smarts, this one senses hesitation in the search box and only then displays the results—that way…
Yahoo’s Elegant Interaction Design in Search
I read in Techcrunch about Yahoo!’s new improvements to search results. What caught my attention was how elegant the search suggestion widget operates. Unlike other search suggestion sites which annoyingly get in the way all the time with their smarts, this one senses hesitation in the search box and only then displays the results–that way…
Handling bad queries
I was discussing eBay search with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a while and he brought up that he was impressed with a number of the changes we’d made over the past year. Flattered, I probed a bit further to find that it was how eBay handled bad queries that he…
AOL Search’s new “saved searches” feature
I’ve been thinking alot lately about how people keep track of past things they’ve found online and was pleased to see AOL’s new saved searches feature today. I think it is important that any eCommerce site or search engine integrate this functionality deeply into the user experience. On mouseover a pair of scissors appears and…
Montreal here we come!
Marti Hearst, Corey Chandler, and I submitted a course application for CHI 2006 over the summer and we received word yesterday that it was accepted! It’s titled “Faceted Metadata for Information Architecture and Search” and will cover leasons learned thru research at UC Berkeley and eBay. If you aren’t already planning on attending the conference,…
Ask Jeeves shares Search stats
Jim Lanzone shared a number of interesting stats from Ask: The money is still in the head: 30% of searches drive 70% of revenue. However over time there will be more competition in the tail. Average word count varies as one would expect. In the head: 1.57 words vs. tail: 5.01 words. The most popular…
New Way to Shop on eBay
I helped drive forward a program of user experience changes to our search products during 2005. The first of which launched in May 2005 as the alpha test for a “New way to Shop on eBay”. In addition to general simplification of the Finding UI, it introduced the following improvements: Multi-faceted browsing (e.g. search by…