Supporting information discovery

Usability is a measure of the ease with which someone can make use of a system to undertake specific tasks. Over the last few years there has been a very significant increase in the level of interest in usability as organizations strive to get the best returns out of their investment in websites.

Among the elements of usability are:

Although there is a vast literature on usability testing there is very little advice on usability issues regarding search. Even the normally invaluable Useit website from Jakob Nielsen has only a few comments on search among the several hundred other entries. Probably the best general resource on the design of search pages is the much-expanded chapter on search in the third edition of Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and Jenifer Tidwell's book on designing interfaces is also a valuable resource.

Search in particular has to be a dialogue, because of the need for the search engine to assist the visitor/user to determine what they already know and then how they wish to proceed with the next stage of the search. The page navigation on a site is more about presenting terms that the visitor/user will be familiar with as a starting point, and then supporting working down through some form of hierarchy to find the information required. This is, of course, a simplistic view of navigation versus search, and elsewhere in this book the point has been made that search and navigation must be complementary.