Anthony Milner

It’s not until a small team get together to build an online search tool that you get an appreciation of what Google and others have done. We recently embarked on a project to improve the search in our Enterprise Content Management System – Community Manager. Last year we introduced federated search and we wanted to build on that success and improve search relevance.

Our challenge – improve search relevance whilst adhering to access rights, incorporate a thesaurus and taxonomies, cater for best bets, stemming and spell checking without sacrificing performance. In our industry this is sometimes referred to as a “non trivial” task.

The Team – We put the band back together on this one. It consisted of a formidable team of experts in the fields of search, taxonomy, thesaurus, usability, sql and asp.net.

The Build – From start to beta it took us 6 weeks to build and implement albeit there were some lengthy requirements sessions and sleepless nights.

The Result – A dramatic improvement to search relevance. Initially there were performance impacts but with subsequent tuning we’re now seeing a fast and highly effective search.

Search is a simple concept that anyone can grasp but when you scratch the surface there are layers of complexity. I guess this explains why Google have thrown some of the brightest minds and resources at the challenge. The great thing is that we now have our very own search product and it even has a name – Community Search.

I’m reading Dan Saffer’s book “Designing for Interaction – Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices”. In the web space Interaction Design is a relatively new field. It’s a bit of an umbrella term that incorporates information architecture, user experience, graphic design, interface design and usability. In my experience with application development projects, the ones that concentrate on the interaction design on par with functionality are the most successful. It doesn’t matter if we build a kitchen sink or a simple widget that goes “ping”, it’s the interaction design that is often the difference between user take up and user rejection. The unfortunate reality is that application design is all too often driven by business priorities which usually translate to function over form and getting as much as possible done within the allocated timeframe and budget. The emphasis is on “we need it to do xyz” as opposed to “we need it to look good and be easy to use”. As practioners in this space we need to fight the good fight for interaction design because a great outcome for our client is important and its our best opportunity to market our capability and win more work.

Nora Ephron at The New York Times has defined the 6 stages of email and it’s quite accurate. I’ve recently moved from stage 4 to stage 5 and I hope she’s wrong about stage 6 J