Description
When people want to locate and discover information, they can simply type keywords into a search engine (not only Google) and select items from the first page of search results, right? This is the current mental model of how search/retrieval works for most users of all ages.
Sense-making is a searcher behavior that information architects, user experience (UX) and usability pros should not ignore. Search listings not only should make sense to individuals, they should also make sense to groups of people.
This workshop will answer the following questions:
- Which parts of a search listing must make sense to people before they will click (or tap) on a link?
- Where does sense-making occur during different parts of a search task?
- What do common search systems use for display in search listings?
- Does the type of search query affect the type of information that must make sense in search listings? (Short answer: yes!)
- Do document owners have complete or limited control over how search listings appear?
- How can we architect search listings so that they make sense for multiple target audiences?
Downloadable materials included. Workshop also includes a Sense-Making & Search Clinic to address your most pressing architecture questions.
About the speakers
Shari Thurow has optimized, designed, & architected web interfaces since 1995. She is outsourced to many organizations worldwide.
Shari is the co-author of When Search Meets Web Usability which shows how to bridge the gap between web search-engine results pages and your website. She is also the author of Search Engine Visibility, translated into 6 languages.
Her consulting firm, Omni Marketing Interactive , is a full-service search engine optimization (SEO), website usability, information architecture (IA), & user-centered design firm. She served on the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) & the User Experience Professionals Organization (UXPA).
She currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the ASLIB Journal of Information Management. She is one of the Co-Founders of the Information Architecture Gateway, which has been accepted into the SGCI (Science Gateway Communities Institute) Incubator Program. SGCI is part of the National Science Foundation.
Her doctoral work is in Library & Information Sciences (LIS) with an emphasis on Human and Computer Interfaces (HCI), including information retrieval (IR), search usability, interaction design, & searcher experience.
Clients include the Huffington Post, Sony Music, Angie’s List, Best Buy, Home Depot, Best Western, Fisher Price, ABC News, WebMD, the National Cancer Institute, Encyclopedia Britannica, Facebook, & Microsoft.
Noreen Whysel is a NYC-based IA/UX Researcher. Her first IA project was tagging buttons in a database at Chanel in 1990. She began her actual UX career in the late 1990s after seven years in real estate research at Price Waterhouse. She joined the PWC merger team as a WebOps Manager and was there for four years before starting an IA/Research consulting business, working on projects as diverse as bird taxonomies and identity ecosystems. She was the Operations Manager at the Information Architecture Institute for ten years and held a similar role at the OWASP Foundation. She is a Co-Founder and COO of Decision Fish, leads product integrity research at the Me2B Alliance and hosts the Behavioral Economics NYC meet-up. She is a coordinating member of UX Camp 2021, a board member of GISMOnyc, and a member of working groups developing trusted identity standards and ethical frameworks. She has a BA in Psychology from Columbia and a MSLIS from Pratt Institute.
Noreen has attended this conference since 2007 in Las Vegas and has only missed two since then. She was a Co-Chair at IAC20 and Experience Director at IAC19. She gave talks on IA and Emergency Management in 2013, IA and Wikipedia in 2016 and Trust and Vulnerable Populations in 2019. She has presented at poster night five times and is a frequent speaker mentor.