Search Behavior Patterns

Ramzi Sh. Alqrainy

Agenda
Introduction Factors that affect user behavior Personas Patterns of Behavior Conclusion References

Introduction
Search, more than any other activity, is a living, evolving process of discovery a conversation between a customer and the Web site. Unfortunately, this conversation is often fraught with miscommunication, and so it is critical for you to keep this conversation going even when the customer has initiated a search that yielded no results.

Factors that affect user behavior

Search behavior is the result of interplay among several independent factors the user brings to the search operation, four of which are described below. Designers have no more control over these than they have over the color of the users hair. A search engine on an organizations website or intranet is often built to support an overly narrow model of user behavior, which goes something like this: User types in a search Search engine gives back matching results User reads the results and picks the best one

1. Domain Expertise
User behavior has a lot do to with a users familiarity with the subject on which he or she is searching. When searching outside a domain of expertise, people will be less certain where to start, use less precise language, and have more difficulty evaluating search results. By contrast, experts in a field generally know what verbiage will work best, and so generally get better results, from which theyre better able to discern the most useful documents.

2. Search experience
Users who have a better understanding of the breadth of a search engines capabilities have more ways to go about finding information. If you know how to use Boolean operators, exact strings, filtering controls, and have proven strategies for exploiting search, then you have a much richer toolset at your disposal. But search experience also isnt an absolute requirement for success. We have seen that users who are short on technical know-how but rich in domain knowledge can often get by. On the other hand, technophiles can have great difficulty finding information in an unfamiliar body of knowledge.

3. Goal type
Search goals will vary from one query to the next, and may be broadly classified into three categories as outlined by Andrei Broder in his article A Taxonomy of Web Search:

Navigational searches are efforts to reach a particular location, such as an intranets timesheet application. Informational searches seek out any documents relating to a topic, like a description of employee benefits. Transactional searches occur when the user primarily wants to accomplish something online, like changing her benefits elections.

4. Mode of seeking
The extent to which users understand what they are trying to find determines their mode of seeking. The level of understanding can range from known items, where people know exactly what they need and how to describe it, to much more exploratory searches, where they have only a loose concept what they want to find. Furthermore, as Marcia Bates pointed out in her oft-cited 1989 paper The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface, information needs are often unstable and may evolve as a user learns more about a subject area.

Personas
Grounding abstract ideas in concrete personas can help bring all of these factors to life. Personas are descriptions of typical users that illustrate key attributes that are relevant to the design of a website or online system. An understanding of the motives underlying user actions, like those detailed above, provides a great starting point for authoring personas.
For instance, the hypothetical people described below each illustrate different areas of domain knowledge, and represent a spectrum of search experiences and cognitive styles. They will be used to relate the factors above to the common search behavior patterns that follow.
Andrea is a technical wiz who is completely comfortable with search engines. She is a project manager for a mainframe manufacturing division of her company. Her cognitive style tends to be analytical. Dmitry has moderate technical know-how. He works in the benefits administration division of his companys HR department. He learns new information globally about as often as he does analytically. Kazue is generally uncomfortable with technology, but is a recognized expert in her field of instructional design. She tends to be a global thinker who prizes an understanding of the big picture.

Patterns of Behavior
Despite the large number of variables tugging user actions this way and that, they translate into a relatively small number of common patterns of behavior. 1) Minimizing the results set 2) Surveying quickly 3) Making immediate judgments 4) Agonizing over the query 5) Pogo sticking

1. Minimizing the results set

Users sometimes measure the success of a query primarily by the number of results it returns. If they feel the number is too large, they add more terms in an effort to bring back a more manageable set. Given her understanding of how search engines determine relevance, youd expect Andrea to do this if she needed to quickly locate a known item within her domain expertise, like mainframe manufacturing.

Design recommendations:
Allow users to filter the search results by categories, so they can reduce the number of results while making them more topical. Include a numeric count of the total number of results returned for the query and the total number for each category.

Use and as the default operator rather than or, so the number of results narrows instead of growing as the user adds more terms. Dont confound this behavior by truncating the total results set at a round number like 100 or 500; this makes it difficult for users like Andrea to gauge the quality of her query.

2. Surveying quickly Some users scan through the results quickly, and if none of the titles strike them as an ideal match, they may proceed several pages deep into the results set. Ive seen these users go to the fifth or sixth page of results without hesitation, then go back to the initial results to look more carefully or submit another query. For instance, Dmitry could do this to hedge his strategy if his task isnt fully defined. Hopeful that something will just pop out at him, he may do a quick scan of the first few pages, then fall back to another strategy if that doesnt work out.

Design recommendations:
Ensure that result titles are comprehensible at a glance, including application files like PDFs and Word documents, which often return cryptic file names by default. Highlight the terms that match the words originally submitted to help people scan the titles and descriptions more easily.

Allow users to change the number of results shown per page to avoid navigating through too many paginated results.

3. Making immediate judgments

Other users look only at the first few results before deciding whether the query was successful or not. Finding nothing, these users may then resubmit the query or give up on search altogether. Andrea, the analytical thinker, would be discriminating about a results relevance to a narrowly defined informational goal. Confident in her expertise, she would also be quick to conclude that search is flawed if it cannot return a good match in the first few listings. This behavior requires that the best match be returned as close to the top of the list as possible.

Design recommendations:
Optimize results for the most commonly submitted queries. Working from the search logs, try out each of the top queries and evaluate the quality of the top results returned, then optimize the content of those pages to improve their ranking. When pages cannot be further optimized, include a manually generated Best Bets sidebar to force those matches to appear at the top. This gives the page a second chance to hit the specific target in Andreas mind.

4. Agonizing over the query

Sometimes users have difficulty translating the concept they want to find into a specific search phrase. They will often rewrite the query several times before submitting it, and then focus on revising it further if the results are not as they had expected them to be. Less experienced users like Kazue are more likely to show this behavior, especially if the task isnt well defined and lies conceptually outside of her domain. Kazue may also be inclined to phrase the query generally enough to satisfy her global cognitive style, but fret over how general is too general.

Design recommendations:
Consider providing tools that assist in formulating the query, such as suggestion functions that present searches similar to the one the user is typing.

Consider including lists of popular searches or automated storage of the users previous queries, saved to a profile or cookie.

5. Pogo sticking
Some users click several results in rapid succession, quickly sampling each before settling on a best candidate to meet their needs. Jared Spool has described this as pogo stickingbouncing up and down between choices of uncertain relative value. This is the kind of behavior that Dmitry might resort to if the quick surveying behavior described for him above didnt yield anything. Assuming that his temperament is fairly tolerant and he isnt pressed for time, Dmitry may decide that he cannot determine the usefulness of pages without looking at them. These users need support for three primary tasks: assessing result listings, comparing result pages, and tracking work.

Design recommendations:
Again, provide comprehensible titles and descriptions on the results page, as well as highlighted search terms. Pages can be even more effectively compared if highlighting can be extended to the display of the results page itself (as is possible with Yahoo! and Google toolbars). Allow users the option to open results in a new browser window to assist comparison. Sites like Ask and Easy Search Live are experimenting with page previews. Be sure to include a visited link color on the results page. This is absolutely essential for Dmitry to keep track of the pages he has already tried and rejected as he jumps to each of the matches from the hub listing page.

Conclusion
Search behavior varies with domain expertise and technical knowledge, goal, and mode of seeking. All of these factors will interact in complex ways to influence a users actions. Even then, behaviors will vary depending upon whether at that moment the user is under pressure, in a good mood, or any number of other idiosyncrasies. The point is that the designer cannot select the behavior that a user will follow when conducting a search. This may invite the impression that the design must be overly broad, providing any conceivable function regardless of the likelihood it will be used, because we cannot predict whether it will be needed. Fortunately, users actual behaviors do fall into generally describable patterns, each of which has dependencies upon specific affordances of the interface. This is how designers can better cater to what appears to be chaos: make available those capabilities that best support the range of known behavior patterns for your target personas.

References
(1) James Kalbach provides an overview of literature around this topic in his article Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web (2) For more on expert search behavior, see these two articles: Christoph Hlscher & Gerhard Strube (2000): Web Search Behavior of Internet Experts and Newbies; Suresh K. Bhavanani (2002): Domain-Specific Search Strategies for the Effective Retrieval of Healthcare and Shopping Information, CHI 2002, pp. 610-611. and Search Behavior Patterns by John Ferrara (3) See Ryen W. White & Steven M. Drucker (2007): Investigating Behavioral Variability in Web Search, International World Wide Web Conference 2007, pp. 21-30. (4) See Donna Maurer (2006): Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them. (5) David Fiorito and Richard Dalton further described different types of navigation in their presentation at the 2004 IA Summit, Creating a Consistent Enterprise Web Navigation Solution. (6) Greg Nudelman is author of Designing Search UX Strategies for eCommerce Success

[Link]@[Link]