ized for electronics. It embodies what librarians have been saying about the differences between generalized search versus vertical search, offering deep cataloging and deep linking, as well as nice experimentation with features for refining queries in the electronic domain. Shazam is a music discovery engine that helps you find that elusive, hummable, but unnamable track from your past.

Yes indeed, these are exciting times—there is much design and engineering work to be done. As a result, I get a little irritated when an otherwise perfectly nice person told me that the “real” work of search is what happens at the engineering level and that designers are really involved only in the “fluff.” This guy underscores a sad fact of life: that there is a productive but not always comfortable relationship between design and engineering. However, if we think Internet search is only about the underlying engine— what goes on under the hood (the “back end”)—then we are mistaken. And of course, design is more than generating graphics for an interface. The interface is the broker between the person, the “user,” and the underlying algorithms, and that involves many levels of understanding.

Here are the things I personally and informally associate with design thinking, analysis, and practice, and all of these are needed to move the search experience forward: 1. aesthetics, which, as Don Norman’s book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things suggests, are more important than one might think. It is easier to be patient with the worst of tools if it looks good and feels good; 2. graphics, and information repre-

sentation, surfacing information so it is comprehensible, readable in context; 3. the design of interaction and information flows, understanding information in use over time and foundationally, 4. ontologies and information architecture, considering the ways in which information structures underlie and drive information flows and interaction over time—addressing questions of what constitute data and metadata given different orientations, tasks, activities, practices, and worldviews.

It is important that designers of interactive artifacts take an active role in shaping the ways in which information is gained from the user in an interactive way and an active role in understanding how that information is used systemically—by the engine, under the hood. Because it is here that some notional “user” with some model of their “intent” is being tacitly or explicitly constructed. Human-centered design is about providing tools that allow people to acquire and use knowledge over time. Therefore, design professionals are perfectly placed to work with engineers to consider conversational and ideational aspects of enquiry and knowledge exploration, as well as to help people create knowledge that is searchable and ultimately, to develop the dynamic ontologies that are part and parcel of a responsive, reactive, evolving information-seeking experience that utilizes domain-centric, advanced search features. Recent developments mean it is increasingly possible for great design to couple with excellent engineering and prove this point. SearchMonkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) are

part of Yahoo!’s open search Web services platform [ 2]. Designers and developers are invited to build on top of the existing infrastructure to create new search experiences.

As a field-based designer/eval-uator who likes to observe technologies in action, I often feel like my work is to point out anomalies and to bring about paradigm shifts that are not just changing the look but that are pointing to a shift in the way in which the problem is constructed and therefore the way in which the solution is engineered. Thomas Kuhn, in his work on scientific revolutions, talks about anomalies as instigators of change, of paradigm shifts. He defined an anomaly to be a violation of the “paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.” If we want a paradigm shift in information seeking and finding, it is up to us to bring about that revolution by more deeply understanding human information seeking and finding, by challenging assumptions that exist about information production and consumption, and showing that information can morph and make itself known to us in more artful ways.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time Elizabeth researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. Elizabeth rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.

November + December 2008

DOI: 10.1145/1409040.1409052
© 2008 ACM 1072-5220/08/1100 $5.00