KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search 2010: Making Maps for Knowledge Discovery
Posted by Bill Ives on Fri, Nov 19, 2010
Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the keynote session, Search Patterns: Making Maps for Knowledge Discovery led by Peter Morville, President, Semantic Studios, & Author, Search Patterns, his book with a butterfly on the cover. We like this. Here is the session description:
“Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. It's also a radically multidisciplinary, creative challenge. In this talk, Peter Morville defines a pattern language for search and discovery that embraces user psychology and behavior, cross-channel information architecture, multisensory interaction, and emerging technology. He identifies design principles that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time. And, he explains how futures methods and user experience deliverables can help us to create better search interfaces and applications today and invent the improbable discovery tools of tomorrow.”
Peter said that as he encounters intranets he often sees strange architecture with components simply added on in a random pattern. He also noted that browsing does not scale. Search is one of the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences how we find stuff but also how we shop and many other things.
Search admin people often blame users for applying the wrong keywords when they cannot find things. This is the opposite of what should be done. Search is an iterative and interactive process. What we find changes our approach if we are sensitive to our discoveries. Search is a complex adaptive system if done right.
We also need to continue to remove the no longer useful information. Search is better when it looks at a smaller target. We need to involve the content creators so they make their content easier to find.
Making search better requires attention to detail. We need to design for incremental progress, as well as immediate response and predictability. We need to give users a sense of confidence in what happens as they engage with the system.
Search means many things to different people, as there are many forms of search. Mobile search often leads people to browsing to avoid too many keystrokes. This is the same with kiosks. However, browsing does not scale so more features need to be incorporated.
Peter has been inspired by the book, The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, who studied the evolution of buildings. Peter created a search patterns library on the Web and this led to his book, Search Patterns. He found several patterns: thrashing, pearl growing, and narrowing. Thrashing is simply doing small changes but you can get struck by being too tied to your start. We need to be able to move people beyond this. Pearl growing is an expert technique of finding one great document and building from there. It is taught in library science.
Auto-complete is one technique to aid search. Yahoo has been advanced here. They look at prior behaviors as well as post search behavior. Another technique is putting the first content first. Google is a master here. It also succeeds with its speed.
Federated search is an interesting approach as it is both a solution and a symptom of things that need to be addressed. There needs to be tighter integration of different content types. He has been working on this issue at the Library of Congress. They are moving from a federated search model to an integrated search.
Faceted navigation allows people to search as they might do normally. They can start and then narrow with facets. You need to think about the right order of facets. This approach blurs browsing and searching as you can browse the facets. As an aside, the Darwin Awareness Engine™ Scan Cloud™ sets up a dynamically created facet field to browse or explore.
Peter showed a cartoon of a drunk searching for his keys on his iPhone. He added that this is actually a possibility. We said that we have seen amazing growth in the searchable Web. On an iPhone you can search by singing or sketching. Soon you may be able to search by smell or taste. Brainport helps blind people to see. Images are translated into senses that are sent to the tongue. After 24 hours, people began to realize that this is visual information.
We often do not have the vocabulary to discuss these new things. Amazon Remembers allows you to take a photo of anything. It then tries to figure out what the object in the photo is and if can they can sell it to you.
There is a lot of cross media integration. Apple is a master of this with their iPods MacBooks, iPads, IPhones. There is also a lot of transformation of changing products into services such as the Zipcar. I remember Forbes predicting this in 1990. He also showed the tweeting weight scale. I have seen this before and agree that it is too much information. Service blueprints can show the touch points for a customer experience. Peter said these are good but he said they can be too service oriented and he offered a more mapping approach
Peter said that as an information architect he maps paths across physical, digital and cognitive spaces. In conclusion he said that search is an important part of knowledge management. It is a problem that is never solved and is part of the broader challenge of the user experience. It is very multi-dimensional. This was a great session. Here are my notes from hisEnterprise Search Summit keynote in May. There was a lot of new information today.