Disclaimer: the stories we're sharing about our *own* search behavior need
to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
I hardly ever search Amazon. But I use Amazon all the time-primarily through
my encounters with Amazon in Google. These are sometimes precise searches
(Kodak 650) and sometimes imprecise searches (is there such a thing as a PC
card with SD slots and can I find one that doesn't hang out over the edge of
my laptop?). But the first-page results for many of these searches
invariably lead me to Amazon, and when I get to the item page, I find more
than just a bibliographic description. In the case of the PC card with an SD
slot, after confirming that these things do exist, Amazon user reviews told
me the most important piece of information-yes, you can buy one that doesn't
stick out-and added that very large SD cards might not work with some
models. Amazon then pointed me to similar items, and even told me which were
popular. I have the added lure than if I buy such a thing I can return to
Amazon and share my experience. I can easily park my finds in a basket (I
know I'm not the only one with a huge cart filled with all kinds of goodies
I don't want to forget).
Amazon isn't the only place that Google takes me. There are review sites,
and user forums, and blog posts, and heaven knows what else. There's an
obvious point, eh: Google-it has a lot of stuff in it! But never has Google
taken me to a library site, at least not on the first couple of results
pages (and after that, I don't look).
In terms of precision, if the first results in a search are good-and here I
speak not in terms of my own experience but known usability principles-the
user is happy. Or not. In any event, the user stops. I know initially a lot
of us including me fussed over "but Google returns umpty-ump results!" That
doesn't matter. Most people don't go past that first page. How we get the
library's resources on that first page is one part of the problem. These
other systems see themselves as competing with a much larger information
universe where the planets revolve around the user. These systems are
*designed* that way. How many OPACs are *designed* that way?
But stepping back from book catalogs versus book catalogs... If we wanted to
design the next-gen whosis, seems to me we wouldn't even start with the OPAC
search logs I have discussed or any of the problems we're discussing. We'd
start with a group of users, ask them about their information-seeking
behavior in the last month, find out what they did to satisfy their needs,
and engineer backwards from there. It might not all be technical
engineering-I do believe we need to think harder at how we market
ourselves-but a lot of it would be.
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 13:57:04 EDT