Lou Rosenfeld: IA Heuristics for Search Systems (02 Sep 2004)

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Lou Rosenfeld: IA Heuristics for Search Systems (02 Sep 2004)
Another day, another project, another set of IA heuristics. A client asked me to kick the tires of their search system, so I decided to expand on the search aspects of the information architecture heuristics that we came up with a couple weeks back.

This time, I tried to align and categorize these guidelines with some common steps users take when searching a site. This semi-sequence goes like this:

1, Locating search: Where is it?
2. Scoping search: What will be searched?
3. Query entry: How can I search it?
4. Retrieval results: What did I find?
5. Query refinement: How can I search some more?
6. Interaction with other IA components: Can I switch to browsing when search isn't doing the trick?
7. Finishing search: What can I do now that I've done searching?

Article URL: http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000290.html

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