Designing the Structured Search Experience: Rethinking the Query-Builder Paradigm
I'm pleased to report that our paper 'Designing the Structured Search Experience: Rethinking the Query-Builder Paradigm' has finally come out in Weave: Journal of Library User Experience. It's been a long time in the making, partly as Weave comes out only twice a year, but mostly as we wanted to include some key changes and updates from our latest work. What makes this paper different is that for the first time we've had the scope and mandate to explore the UX issues in some depth. Whereas in previous papers we've rather glossed over these things as 'simply good design' or 'what UX practitioners are meant to just get on and do', in this paper we took the opportunity to demonstrate how solving a challenge like this involves a level of nuance and complexity that may not be immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and moreover, that what you see in the deployed app is actually the culmination of significant design exploration and thinking - much of which ends up on the 'cutting room floor'. Even just the algorithm for painting the iteratively nested containers (in alternating white/blue) was non-trivial, as you need to avoid edges where boxes meet at different level of nesting, i.e. resulting in a white on white or blue on blue boundary. Ironically tho, that bit of detail, interesting tho it is, didn't make the final cut: you'll have to wait for a subsequent blog post for that :)
Anyway, feedback so far has been very informative. Keep it coming in! New release coming soon, so happy to accommodate thoughts & suggestions. Abstract appended below.
Knowledge workers such as healthcare information professionals, legal researchers, and librarians need to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible. The traditional solution is to use command-line query builders offered by proprietary database vendors. However, these are based on a paradigm that dates from the days when users could access databases only via text-based terminals and command-line syntax. In this paper, we present a new approach in which users express concepts as objects on a visual canvas and manipulate them to articulate relationships. This offers a more intuitive user experience (UX) that eliminates many sources of error, makes the query semantics more transparent, and offers new ways to collaborate, share, and optimize search strategies and best practices.
Read full article.