Designing the Search Experience: The Information Architecture of Discovery

"Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate are industry veterans in when it comes to search user experience. They offer a great overview of the dimensions of information-seeking behavior: users, goals, context, and search modes. More importantly, they explain how you can apply these dimensions in designing a compelling search experience for your users." -Daniel Tunkelang, Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn "Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time, and in myriad contexts from e-commerce and enterprise to mobile and social, it remains a massive user experience headache. If you dare to tackle this wicked problem, be sure to bring along Designing the Search Experience as your faithful guide." -Peter Morville, author of Search Patterns: Design for Discovery

Tony Russell-Rose is director of UXLabs, a UX research and design consultancy specializing in complex search and information access applications. Before founding UXLabs he was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca UI Design Pattern Library, an online resource dedicated to best practice in the design of search and discovery experiences. Prior to this he was technical lead at Reuters, specializing in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters he was R&D group manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where he led a team developing next generation information access products and services. Earlier professional experience includes a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship at HP Labs working on speech UIs for mobile devices, and a Short-term Research Fellowship at BT Labs working on intelligent agents for information retrieval. His academic qualifications include a PhD in human-computer interaction, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. He also holds the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London. He is currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group. Tyler Tate is the co-founder and design lead of TwigKit, a London-based company that provides a library of user interface components for rapidly building search-based applications. At TwigKit he has helped numerous startups, corporations, and government organizations achieve superb search experiences. Prior to specializing in search Tyler ran a small design studio, taught a university course on web design, worked at a content management company, and most recently was the design lead at Nutshell, a customer relationship management company. Tyler also organizes the Enterprise Search London meetup. He has written articles for online publications such as A List Apart, Boxes & Arrows, UX Magazine, Johnny Holland, UX Matters, and Smashing Magazine, and has created two CSS frameworks-the 1KB CSS Grid and the Semantic Grid System-which have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. He is @TylerTate on Twitter and blogs at TylerTate.com. Tyler is an American currently living in Cambridgeshire, England with his wife, Ruth, and two boys, Galileo and Atticus.

PART 1 A Framework for Search and Discovery

Chapter 1 The User

Chapter 2 Information Seeking

Chapter 3 Context

Chapter 4 Modes of Search and Discovery

PART 2 Design Solutions

Chapter 5 Formulating the Query

Chapter 6 Displaying and Manipulating Results

Chapter 7 Faceted Search

Chapter 8 Mobile Search

Chapter 9 Social Search

Part 3 Designing the Future

Chapter 10 Cross-Channel Information Interaction