Introduction
Search engine ergonomics is not in its infancy and, at present, ergonomic recommendations for search engine design are relatively well documented (for example in the usability.gov book ) but are generally based on relatively old studies.
Despite the age of these studies, most of the criteria are still valid, because the behavior and cognitive abilities of users are not changing so quickly. What is changing rapidly, however, is our understanding of users and their environment. (The environment in terms of usage needs and technological capabilities of web development).
The purpose of this post is therefore to make a small inventory of articles that present a new look at this field. This post will be separated into three parts which concern respectively:
14 best practices associated with research behaviors:
In January 2008, boxes and arrows published an article on types of search behaviors . What emerges from this article is, on the one hand, a better understanding of the constraints that influence users and, on the other hand, the identification of six types of behavior with associated ergonomic recommendations. They therefore identified six important constraints:
I do not dwell on these constraints because, unfortunately, ergonomists and developers have no control over them. The most interesting aspect of this article is therefore the identification of six types of behavior for which they provide design recommendations. They can be summarized as follows:
Alternate between browsing and searching:
Minimize the result set:
Overview of the results (The user reads the titles of several pages then makes his choice):
Immediate judgment (The user looks at the first results and determines if his request is successful):
Formulation Difficulties (User has problems formulating an effective query):
Back and forth (The user quickly walks through the results to directly see their content before choosing the best one):
Conclusion of part 1 :
I must say that the recommendations provided in this article, although relevant, do not present major innovations because we already use most of them during our analyzes. What is very interesting, however, is the identification of research models and constraints. This can turn out to be extremely useful when you have to do ergonomic consulting for sites that target a specific category of users. In this case, based on these models, it becomes easier to focus the design on the important aspects for such and such a category (such and such a type of behavior) and thus create a search engine which will maximize the customer experience.
to follow, a review of advanced research. (Keep you posted: )