Neuroscience
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox had a nice (if sobering) column in March: "Converting Search into Navigation."
But again, remember that students aren't as savvy at using Google as you (or they) think they are!
found through Greg Notess' | Search Engine Showdown April 2013 blog post "Searcher Behavior."
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Neuroscience
Search: Fail
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| image from findicons |
Nielsen's conclusion: "Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users' research skills as 'incompetent,' and they’ve only gotten worse over time. 'Pathetic' and 'useless' are words that come to mind after this year's user testing."
His study focused on e-commerce websites, but I think the results would be even worse if we studied user search behavior for academic purposes. His first user had trouble finding a pink iPhone case on Amazon, largely because she was unable to translate her meaning into something that Amazon could understand, or as Nielsen put it, she did not "realize that Amazon uses a full-text search that doesn't understand the meaning of a query."
Nielsen suggests that websites should be designed for "mediocre searchers." I know that the UNC Library is trying hard to do this with its book catalog and Articles+ super search. Sadly, library database vendors aren't as good at this.
What's the solution? At a minimum, be aware that your students aren't as search savvy as you think they are — they are likely not as search savvy as you are.
In an email to faculty, I added: in an ideal world, I'd have you invite me to come talk to you students. An interim step is for you to tell your students to come talk to me (or another librarian) about improving their searches in Google and using better resources like America's News (for news articles) or Communication and Mass Media Complete (for scholarly articles in JOMC areas).
found through Greg Notess' | Search Engine Showdown April 2013 blog post "Searcher Behavior."
- Find Good Research, Free
image source: FindIcons I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research. I wrote this post for the...
- The Future Of Reference
A colleague (hi Terry!) asked me to speak on a panel in his class about the future of reference. I'm a poor prognosticator (tho' I like to say the word), but I have a few thoughts. Here's a bit of what I said in class: Even before I talk about...
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I'm going to do a short presentation on usability for Simmons GSLIS (West) on March 24. I'll talk about good usability principles and show some examples from some recent testing I helped do at work. If you're part of the GSLIS community, I...
- Hollywood's Usability Bloopers
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 18 is called Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers, and it pokes fun at computer user interfaces as depicted in the movies. Kind of funny, esp. the line from Jurassic Park in which a 12-year old says "This...
- 2 Clicks 2 Stuff
I'm listening to Roy Tennant's keynote at the Access 2006 Library Conference. He's terrific, as usual, and what I'm really struck with is his suggestion (challenge?) that we get our users to "stuff" within 2 clicks. A good example he...