When looking at current research, there is plenty of existing work inquiring into how users use search engines1 and how future search interfaces could look like2. Yet, an investigation of users’ perceptions of and expectations towards current and future search interfaces is still missing.
Therefore, at this year’s International Conference on WWW/Internet (ICWI ’16) my co-author Martin Gaedke presented our paper “REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users”, which we wrote together with Andreas Both. To give you an idea of what our work aims at, I’m going to provide a step-by-step explanation of the research paper’s title.
REFOCUS. An acronym for Requirements for Current & Future Search Interfaces.
Search Interface Requirements. From an exploratory study with both qualitative and quantitative questions we have derived a set comprising 11 requirements for search interfaces. The initial set of requirements was validated by 12 dedicated experts.
Current. The requirements shall be valid for current search interfaces. According to the experts’ reviews, this applies to eight of the requirements.
Future. Also, the set of requirements shall inform the design and development of future search interfaces. According to the experts’ reviews, this applies to ten of the requirements. Supporting the design of future search interfaces is particularly important with the wide variety of Internet-capable novel devices, like cutting-edge video game consoles, in mind.
German-speaking Users. Due to the demographics of our participants, the set of requirements can be considered to be valid for German-speaking Internet users. 87.3% of the participants were German while 96.6% lived in a German-speaking country at the time of the survey.
If this sounds interesting to you, please go check out our research paper at ResearchGate or arXiv. The original publication will be available via the IADIS Digital Library.
1 For instance, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/09/search-engine-use-2012/ (accessed November 8, 2016).
2 For instance, Hearst, M. A. ‘Natural’ Search User Interfaces. In Commun. ACM 54(11), 2011.
2008 – Tales of Design & User Experience 