Designing Finding and Discovery
Great post at Adobe about a neglected area of design: the holistic experience of getting to good content. I use soft-edged words in that description — “getting” rather than finding, “good” rather than right — to highlight that the experiences we craft need to allow for semi-directed, imperfectly-focused user behavior. Too often, we’re looking for the right answers rather than the right systems, we discuss user needs when they’re actually wants, or tasks that need to be completed when maybe it’s the equivalent of window shopping they’re doing.
Browsing, searching, and asking might all take place within a single attempt to find information. Finding routes are often quite circuitous, iterative, and surprising. There certainly are simple, straightforward instances of finding—say, looking up a colleague’s phone number in a staff directory. But wandering through and learning about information—with pauses to search, browse, and ask along the way—is how many of us find information and learn about both the complex (for example, determining the most appropriate health plan our employer offers) and the seemingly simple (like choosing a plumber).
As a designer who works in agency environments, I often get caught between the marketing attempt to direct a behavior (applying funnels or merchandising logic to discovery scenarios). The language of this post does a nice job of describing the user’s state(s) of mind and avoids putting too fine a point on what they’re doing.
With all of its twists and turns, finding can be lovely and life-changing. Even when we fail to find—and we often do—we still learn. Finding is arguably at the center of all user experiences. … Unfortunately, most of the systems we design don’t really support finding. We might do a bang-up job with searching, browsing, or asking. But we’ve failed at integrating them well; therefore our designs fail at helping users to shift effortlessly between these different aspects of finding, and instead impose harsh interruptions on the process.
And then a topic near and dear to my heart: the need for designers to broaden what they think of as in their purview:
But there is another, less-obvious form of complacency common to so many designers: they don’t design for holistic experiences—like integrated finding—because they don’t speak data. Designers haven’t paid much attention to the terabytes of user data being logged right under their noses. Fortunately, that’s changing.