on Boxes and Arrows, Newsmap, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and Ebay
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was excited about finding Boxes and Arrows through the IA Summit site; now that I’ve taken a bit more time to explore, I can see not only acknowledge the implementation of solid IA in the site’s organization, but appreciate the site as a great resource for any level of IA or information science explorer.
While I played around with Newsmap, I was ambivalent about its use. The very impressive part, of course, is the double-coding of news stories by topic and by popularity (using clear visual elements of larger text and different colors)—I can understand how this could allow a user to quickly browse the largest news stories rather than sift through pages and pages using, say, the Google news aggregator by itself, or a number of news sites. On the down side—and I’ll blame bad resolution for this, too—I wasn’t able to see the smaller articles (the text wasn’t clear) and, overall, I was a little distracted by the variety of colors and sizes and the large number of boxes. Sifting news this way feels as if I am not thoroughly interacting, but rather am grabbing almost randomly—especially when I start to try to read the articles marked by smaller boxes and move through most of the page.
Since I have used Amazon almost daily for work for the past six years, I admit to a bias from the outset—though I know better than to rely on their spotty customer support, their navigation, search system, and controlled vocabulary are definitely better than average for any retail site. Navigation is easy, especially as driven by facets on the left, (the same is true whether browsing from the front page or when navigating from a search result to drill deeper). The search results are good—not always great, but good. An example: search for a popular show that is available in multiple formats, like Warehouse 13. This show is available on DVD as well as through Amazon’s Video on Demand streaming video collection. Upon searching for just ‘warehouse 13’ on the front page, though, the search results in order are: 1)Warehouse 13 season 1 on DVD,
2)Eureka season 3.5 on DVD (a show that has had a cross-over, is from the same network, and is noted as having similar viewers based on the ‘customer who bought this’ notes on Warehouse 13 and Eureka titles on Amazon, but is not Warehouse 13),
3)Warehouse 13 season 2 video on demand,
4) Warehouse 13 season two (notice the difference in terminology between seasons, ‘2’ versus ‘two’) on DVD but not yet available,
5)13 Hours in a Warehouse on DVD (a film that is not related to the show),
5)Warehouse 13, season 1 video on demand.
If this search result were as successful as I could hope for, the results would instead at least be all of the Warehouse 13 titles grouped as the first 4 results, rather than spread around through the first 6. Also, the ‘departments’ and categories (facets) for further navigation/finding are very intuitive, clearly driven by user demand and user behavior. Comparing this to other sites—even those like Borders or Barnes & Noble, neither of which are awful—I can understand why Amazon has the market share it does…and not just in books and music!
Yahoo’s site (http://www.yahoo.com/) just seems to be behind the times. That’s a weak critique, but the navigation, while relatively intuitive—I want just news, I hit Ctrl+F to find “news” on the page—is not especially effective. Going to the news subsite, I was able to see a list of stories, and if I worked enough (by either squinting and scrolling down the page for a very long time) I was able to find the timeliness and categories of different news stories. I almost want to take back what I said about Newsmap after trying to view news through this more traditional method, since at least with that site I was able to aggregate news stories into one window rather than sorting through a seemingly endless list. My search results seemed to be weak, too, in that my search queries retrieved results with the search word in the title of the article, (I tried this with ‘Palin’ and ‘BP’). I was on the eighth page of results for ‘BP’ before I found an article without BP in the headline—which tells me that while the search results may work well for people who are looking for specific things (especially if those things can be captured in a keyword that will be in the headline), it does not facilitate discovery or finding of related items—like just an article on the oil spill and economic impact in the Gulf of Mexico.
Google’s site establishes the standard for effective searching, including even aids for exploration like “Searches related to [initial search]” within a user’s search results. Even out of order, (‘Crime and the City Solution’ versus the mis-ordered ‘the solution and city crime’), the results retrieved are related to that group of words, ‘crime and the city solution’. I only received results about urban crime about half-way down the second page of results. The format groups selectable on the left are an intuitive way to target search results, and once going on (to ‘images’ for instance), the further categories available use common language that I expect most or all users could easily employ to reach their goal. Navigation is easy—though this may be biased, since Google is likely the search engine that taught me what to expect of search engines, having used this for so many years after Yahoo, AltaVista, Dogpile, and many others—and even varies by object type; for instance, navigating page results happens in a list of text with interspersed thumbnails for video results, whereas image results strip the text from the top level allowing scanning much more like Newsmap. This seems a much more effective way to browse images, rather than scrolling down an interminable list.
Ebay (http://www.ebay.com) more and more looks like a normal retail site, with ads and large, attractive images taking up a substantial part of the real estate on the front page to promote daily specials and seasonal interests. The search results are, like Yahoo news, based on the headlines (the item title), at least by default. While Ebay does enable a search option to get at the description provided by a seller, this could be a nuisance for the novice Ebay buyer or seller who do not know to select the description as well as the title as the search indexes. Ebay has enabled a fairly smart ‘related searches’ feature, which I would be curious to know more about; I assume that they mine repeating words in similar listings, review all searches as groups by user/session and look for overlapping terms between users, or maybe use some other mechanism. In any event, searching for the Australian band the Cannanes not only led to relevant results in the Music category, but also brought up two related searches of fairly obscure, related bands (by virtue of shared band members), Ashtray Boy and Boyracer. Once a user gets to a results list, the categories for deeper investigation or limiting are intuitive—though I would question whether these categories are tagged by the seller posting the item or by some automated process on the side of Ebay, (I can imagine manipulation by sellers to push their items into multiple categories to try to generate more views, thus more sales).