Donna Maurer’s short article ‘Four Modes of Information Seeking and How To Design For Them’ is a nice, short, practical summary of how users search for information on the web – although unfortunately, the two ‘modes’ she identifies as most under-catered for and most problematic are also those she has the fewest solutions for.
In brief, Maurer’s taxonomy of modes runs
- Known item searching, whereby users ‘know what they want, know what words to use to describe it [and] may have a fairly good understanding of where to start’. Such searching is best served by:
- Search boxes
- A-Z indices
- Quick links to frequently used items
- Browsing by header
- Exploratory searching, whereby site visitors ‘have some idea of what they need to know … however, they may or may not know how to articulate it and, if they can, may not yet know the right words to use. They will usually recognize when they have found the right answer, but may not know whether they have found enough information. In this mode, the information need will almost certainly change as they discover information and learn, and the gap between their current knowledge and their target knowledge narrows’. Effective searching in this mode favours,
- Browsing, broadly defined
- ‘Related information’ links
- Search functions (although this is problematic, as part of the user’s difficulty might be lack of familiarity with keywords)
- ‘Don’t know what you need to know’. In this mode, users aren’t aware of what they need to know; or may have an inaccurate idea of what they need to know; or may have no specific goal in mind in visiting a site. Maurer cites the following situations as archetypal examples of DNWYNTK problems:
- Complex domains (legal, financial, or, one might add, study skills)
- Areas in which the user is to be persuaded of the desirability (whether commercial, intellectual, ‘best practice’, etc.) of some course of action which may be counter-intuitive or involve extra effort
- Unknown domains
- Surfing in order to keep up to date, rather than to answer any particular question
Maurer doesn’t offer many solutions here, but recommends
- pages with straightforward answers to foreseeable questions (a bit like a glorified FAQ, one suspects, in most cases)
- easy linking to find more detailed information
- Refinding: this is an intriguing category, as I suspect almost anyone who spends much time on the web will feel s/he wastes a great deal of time merely hunting out previously found truffles. Despite the number of comments on the article to the contrary, furthermore, this is clearly not the same as known-item searching, as the examples of solutions given by Maurer indicate:
- wishlists (a la Amazon)
- Save For Later (a la eMusic)
- favourites
- del.icio.us
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