A quick update on the status of the Enterprise Search survey.

We now have well over a hundred respondents. The more respondents the better the data will be, so please help spreading the word. We’d love to have  several hundred more. The survey will now be open until the end of April.

But most important of all, if you haven’t already, have a cup of coffee and fill in the survey.

A Few Results from the Survey about Enterprise Search

More than 60% say that the amount of searchable content in their organizations today are less or far less than needed. And in three years time 85% say that the amount of searchable content in the organisation will increase och increase significantly.

75% say that it is critical to find the right information to support their organizations business goals and success. But the interesting to note is that over 70% of the respondents say that users don’t know where to find the right information or what to look for – and about 50% of the respondents say that it is not possible to search more than one source of information from a single search query.

In this context it is interesting that the primary goal for using search in organisations (where the answer is imperative or signifact) is to:

• Improve re-use of information and/or knowledge) – 59%
• Accelerate brokering of people and/or expertise – 55%
• Increase collaboration – 60%
• Raise awareness of “What We Know” – 57%
• and finally to eliminate siloed repositories – 59%

In many organisations search is owned either by IT (60%) or Communication (27%), search has no specified budget (38%) and has less than 1 dedicated person working with search (48%).  More than 50% have a search strategy in place or are planning to have one in 2012/13.

These numbers I think are interesting, but definitely need to be segmented and analyzed further. That will of course be done in the report which is due to be ready in June.

As we all know the smartphone user base is growing explosively. According to www.statcounter.com, internet access from handheld mobile devices has doubled yearly since 2009 adding up to 8,5 % of all page views globally in January 2012. And mobile users want to be able to do all the same things that they are able to do on their PC. And that includes access to the company’s Enterprise Search solution!

The benefits of the sales force being able to search for vital customer information before a meeting or for field service personnel being able to find documentation quickly are quite obvious. So how can an organization tweak its search solution in order to provide convenient access for the mobile users? And above all, what will it cost?

Well, to answer the last question first: much less than you think. Providing for the mobile user is mainly about creating a new front end/UI. The main bulk of your search solution remains the same; indexing, metadata structure and content publishing, for instance, remain essentially unaffected.

But you do need to provide a quite different UI in order for the user interaction to work smoothly considering the specific characteristics of the mobile client primarily when it comes to screen size/resolution and text input. But the smartphone also has a lot of features that the PC lacks – it is always available and it knows exactly where you are, it always has a camera, microphone, speaker, possibly a magnetometer and accelerometer and of course a touchscreen with motions like pinching and swiping etc. And many of these features can be quite useful as the following examples prove:

Illustration 1. Google Mobile Voice Search on the iPhone. Courtesy of UX Matters, www.uxmatters.com

• Google Mobile App for iPhone: in this app, the iPhone senses when the phone is lifted towards the ear and hence knows when to listen for a search command. Since the phone also knows where the user is, a search for “restaurant” automatically generates hits with restaurants in your vicinity.
• Scanning a Barcode or QR-code: scanning a Barcode or QR-code with your phone is another way of entering a search string. An example could be a product in a store where the customer could open a price-search-engine and scan the QR-code of the product and see where the best price is.

As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities for those who want to be creative. But for the most part, the I/O will still be done via the screen. At UX Matters there is a great article by Greg Nudelman describing the considerations when implementing search for mobile clients and suggestions for various design patterns that can be efficient (see http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/04/design-patterns-for-mobile-faceted-search-part-i.php). I have included a brief summary below together with illustrations courtesy of UX Matters. But first, some general considerations for mobile clients:

• Use Javascript code to detect what type of device is accessing your search solution and if it is a mobile client you display the mobile interface.
• Native App or Mobile Web App: Creating a Mobile Web App is easier and cheaper than creating a native App – for one thing you don’t have to create multiple versions for different OS’s (although you still need to test your solution with different browsers/resolutions). Performance wise there isn’t a big difference between Native Apps and Web Apps and mobile browsers are increasingly gaining access to most of the phones hardware as well.
• Authentication: SSO for mobile web applications works the same as for desktop browsers.  There are also new solutions currently being launched enabling usage of the company’s existing Active Directory infrastructure. One example is Centrify Directcontrol for Mobile enabling a centralized administration within Active Directory of all device security settings, profiles, certificates and restrictions.
• Use HTML5 instead of FLASH: iPhones don’t support FLASH but HTML5 is a very capable alternative
• Testing: How the design looks for different resolutions can be tested through various emulators but it is always recommendable to test on a limited set of real smartphones as well.
• Access needs to be quick and simple: user interaction is more cumbersome on a phone than on a PC. Normally try to avoid solutions that require more than 3 input actions.
• Menu navigation: links on the right side are normally used to drill down in the menu hierarchy and left up/towards the home screen
• Gestures: is a very powerful toolbox that can be used in many different ways to create an efficient UI. For example, use “pinch to show more” if you want to expand the summary information of a specific item in the search hit list or “swipe” to expose the metadata (or whatever action you want to assign to that gesture).
• Be creative: the mobile client is inherently different from a PC, limited in some ways but more powerful in others. So if you just try to adopt design solutions from the PC and fit them into a mobile UI you are missing out on a lot of powerful design solutions that only make sense on a mobile client and you are definitely not giving the users the best possible search experience. Also, since mobile design is still evolving you don’t need to be limited by conventions and expectations as much as on the PC side – make the most of this freedom to be creative!
• W3C mobile: for more information about mobile web development, see http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ which also includes a validating scheme to assess the readiness of content for the mobile web

Design patterns for mobile UI (with courtesy of Greg Nudelman/UX Matters)

Mobile faceting can be tricky but by using design patterns like “4 Corners”, “Modal Overlays”, “Watermarks” and “Teaser Design” the UI can become both intuitive and easy to learn as well as providing reasonably powerful functionality. As mentioned, these techniques are summaries from an article written by Greg Nudelman for UX Matters. If you are eager to learn more, feel free to check out Greg’s website and his upcoming workshops focused on mobile design http://www.designcaffeine.com/category/workshops/

4 Corners: instead of stealing scarce real estate by adding faceting options directly on the screen together with the search result, semitransparent buttons are available in each corner enabling the user to bring up a faceting menu by tapping in a corner (see illustration 2).

Modal Overlays: the modal overlay is displayed on top of the original page. The modal overlay works well together with the 4 corners design – tapping a corner opens up the overlay containing faceting functions like filtering and sorting (see illustration 2).

Illustration 2. Four Corners and Modal Overlay patterns. Courtesy of UX Matters, www.uxmatters.com

Watermarks: a great technique for guiding users and showing the possibility of using new functions. The watermarks, possibly animated, show a symbol for the available action, for instance arrows indicating that a swiping gesture could be used (see illustration 3).

Full-Page Refinement Options Pattern: gives the user plenty of refinement options to choose from (see illustration 3).

Illustration 3. Two variations of the Watermark pattern and a Refinement Options pattern. Courtesy of UX Matters, www.uxmatters.com

Teaser Design: show part of the next available content so that the user is aware that there is more content available (see illustration 4).

Illustration 4. Teaser design pattern facilitates the discovery of faceted search filters. Courtesy of UX Matters, www.uxmatters.com

Persistent Status Bar: always maintain a persistent status bar containing the search string together with applied filters in the search result page. This helps the user maintain orientation. Note that all of the illustrations above have a persistent status bar.

Conclusion

Although Best Practices for mobile UI design are still evolving, plenty of progress has already been made and there are several solutions and design patterns to choose from depending on the specific circumstances at hand. So an implementation project need not be rocket science, as long as you learn the right tricks…

Bringing enterprise information to the field, readily available in a mobile handset or tablet, will mobilize your employees. The UI requires rethinking as we have seen. And security needs to be addressed properly to avoid having sensitive data compromised. But other than that, you are ready to go!

A few days ago we launched the “Enterprise Search and Findability Survey“. The survey closes at the end of March.

If you complete the survey you will get the report when it  is finished.

The survey is for people who are responsible for search in their organisations. If you are a search manager, intranet manager, product owner of search, search editor, in-house developer for search, this survey is for you!

The survey aims to help you by finding out your views about Enterprise Search and Findability. The research will help show what business value an Enterprise Search solution can provide.

The survey is structured into five sections, each of which provides a specific perspective on Findability:
• Business
• Organisation
• User
• Information
• Search Technology

More information about the perspectives is provided in each section.

The survey will take approximately 20-30 minutes of your time. If you need a break, you can continue answering the survey at the same question where you left. If you give us your contact information we will send you the finished report based on this survey when it is finished, we are aiming to have it finished by the month of June.

The survey results will be presented at Enterprise Search Europe 2012 (London, 30-31 May 2012) and Enterprise Search Summit (New York, 15-16 May 2012).

We are proud to present the first video on our new Vimeo channel. Enjoy!

Successful search project does not only involve technology and having the most skilled developers, it is not enough. To utilise the full potential and receive return on search technology investments there are five main dimensions (or perspectives) that all need to be in focus when developing search solutions, and that require additional competencies to be involved.

This holistic approach to implementing search technology we call Findability by Findwise.

In the beginning of October I attended Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, USA. There were a lot of interesting and useful topics that were discussed. One really interesting session was Content Targeting with the FAST Search Web Part by Martin Harwar.

Martin Harwar talked about how search can be used to show content on a web page. The most common search-driven content is of course the traditional search. But there are a lot more content that can be retrieved by search. One of them is to have search-driven navigation and content. The search-driven navigation means that instead of having static links on a page we can render them depending on the query the user typed in. If a user is for example on a health care site and had recently done a search on “ear infection” the page can show links to ear specialist departments. When the user will do another search and returns to the same page the links will be different.

In the same way we can render content on the page. Imagine a webpage of a tools business that on its start page has two lists of products, most popular and newest tools. To make these lists more adapted for a user we only want show products that are of interest for the user. Instead of only showing the most popular and newest tools the lists can also be filtered on the last query a user has typed. Assume a user searches on “saw” and then returns to the page with the product lists. The lists will now show the most popular saws and the newest saws. This can also be used when a user finds the companies webpage by searching for “saw” on for instance Google.

This shows that search can be used in many ways to personalize a webpage and thereby increase Findability.

A couple of weeks ago, me and some of my colleagues attended the Enterprise Search Europe conference in London. We’re very grateful to the organizer Martin White at IntranetFocus for arranging the event, and having us as one of the gold sponsors.

For me it was the first time in years I attended a conference like this, and while it was “same old, same old” for many of the attendees, for me it was enlightening to meet up with the industry and have a discussion on where we are as an industry.

There were mainly software vendors and professional services/consultants there, as well a few customers or actual users of enterprise search… and I think the consensus of the two days were that we in the industry STILL haven’t really figured out what we should do with the enterprise search concept, and how to make it valuable for our customers. We at Findwise are not alone with this challenge, but rather it is an industry challenge. There are some vendors who seem to be doing some good work of delivering real value to customers, and also there are a few colleagues to us in the industry that do good professional services/consultant work. At first it was a bit of a downer to realize that we haven’t progressed more during the 10 years I’ve been in the business, but at the same time it was very inspirational to see that we at Findwise together with a few other players, seem to be on the right track with our hard work, and that we have the position to solve some of the real industry challenges we’re facing.

As I see it, if we gather our forces and make a focused “push forward” together now, we will be able to take the industry to a new maturity level where we better solve real business challenges with enterprise search (or search-driven Findability solutions, as we like to call them).

My simple analysis of all the discussions at the conference is that we need to do two things:

1. Manage the whole “full picture” of enterprise search – from strategy to organizational governance, involving necessary competencies to cover all aspects of a successful Findability solution.
2. Break down the customer challenge into manageable chunks, and solve actual business problems, not just solving the traditional “finding stuff when needed” challenge.

I think we are on the right track, and it’s going to be a very interesting journey from here on!

Lou Rosenfeld is the founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media and also the co-author (with Peter Morville) of the best-selling book Information architecture for the World Wide Web, which is considered one of the best books about information management.

In Lou Rosenfeld’s latest book he lets us know how to successfully work with Site Search Analytics (SSA). With SSA you analyse the saved search logs of what your users are searching for to try to find emerging patterns. This information can be a great help to figure out what users want and need from your site.  The search terms used on your site will offer more clues to why the user is on your site compared to search queries from Google (which reveal how they get to your site).

So what’s in the book?

Part I – Introducing Site Search Analytics

In part one the reader gets a great example of why to use SSA and an introduction to what SSA is. In the first chapters you follow John Ferrara who worked at a company called Vanguard and how he analysed search logs to prove that a newly bought search engine performed poorly whilst using the same statistics to improve it. This is a great real world example of how to use SSA for measuring quality of search AND to set up goals for improvement.

a word cloud is one way to play with the data

Part II – Analysing the data

In this part Lou gets hands on with user logs and lets you how to analyse the data. He makes it fun and emphasizes the need to play with user data. Without emphasis on playing, the task to analyse user data may seem daunting. Also, with real world examples from different companies and institutions it is easy to understand the different methods for analysis. Personally, I feel the use of real data in the book makes the subject easier (and more interesting) to understand.

From which pages do users search?

Part III – Improving your site

In the third part of the book, Rosenfeld shows how to apply your findings during your analysis. If you’ve worked with SSA before most of it will be familiar (improving best bets, zero hits, query completion and synonyms) but even for experienced professionals there is good information about how to improve everything from site navigation to site content and even to connect your ssa to your site KPI’s.

Search Analytics For Your Site shows how easy it is to get started with SSA but also the depth and usefulness of it. This book is easy to read and also quite funny. The book is quite short which in this day and age isn’t negative. For me this book reminded me of the importance of search analytics and I really hope more companies and sites takes the lessons in this book to heart and focuses on search analytics.

Providing spot-on results in an Enterprise Findability solution is one of the hardest tasks when rolling out Enterprise Search. Sure, it is doable to work out a generic model for ranking results based on the organization’s most common requirements on findability in conjunction with available metadata of the information made findable. But is it enough?

The burning question is: How can you ensure that the generic relevance model does not get outdated once the Findability solution has been in use for a month, half a year, a year and the implementation crew is long gone?

Findwise recently released a large Enterprise Findability solution at a customer in the electrical power industry in Sweden. In the project we identified personalized and adaptive relevance as two key requirements for the findability solution to provide real, future-proof value-in-use to a large set of people with fundamentally different roles within the company. This blog post will focus on the latter requirement, adaptiveness: How can we make sure that an Enterprise Findability solution returns search results that become better and better as the solution is used?

Let user behavior improve the behavior of the search tool

The Enterprise Findability solution rolled out at the power company contains two features that, put together, build the foundation of a continuously improving relevance model:

1. A feature that promotes popular content given a query term – “social relevance”
2. A feature that continuously changes the relevance model by boosting the relevance of popular documents – “adaptive relevance

Social relevance

Inspired by e-commerce actors on the web, the delivered Enterprise Findability solution uses the logged behavior of its users to promote popular content. When an end-user searches for, e.g. “terawatt hours”, the solution by default offers search results ranked and sorted according to the generic relevance model. This is what any search tool would do. But this solution also uses search logs to promote popular content just as e-commerce sites have been doing for years – “Other people searching for ‘terawatt hours’ viewed ‘Current power production’ (intranet page), ‘Definition of terms in the electrical power industry’ (PDF document)” etc.

By combining the intel of the search logs (where the end-user behavior of an Enterprise Findability solution is constantly collected) and the best bets (editorially provided “sponsored links”) with the regular search result, end-users are presented with a rich set of information answering their original question from different angles. And the best part of it is that the social relevance feature constantly improves as the tool is used. People get better results as time goes by.

Adaptive relevance

In addition to the social relevance feature, the vast amount of real search behavior compiled in the search logs is used for improving the generic relevance model as well. The solution tracks changes in popularity of content and adapts the document-level scores of documents and web pages in the search index accordingly. If a document is accessed often through the search tool, the document will be deemed “more important” and start climbing towards top positions in the search result. And if a previously popular document becomes less popular as time goes by, the document’s impact on the relevance model is decreased. In the end, content that has great importance for a limited amount of time (such as news items and weekly lunch menus) will first peek and then dip in the search index. The search index and the generic relevance model attached to it will stay fresh.

From generic to personalized search experience

This blog post has pinpointed a couple of solutions for a continuously-improving, generic relevance model in an Enterprise Findability solution. Obviously, generic models are generic, i.e. good enough for the many, not perfect for the few. There are great ways to address personalization solving many of the role-based challenges of Enterprise Findability, but let’s leave that to another, future blog post. Stay tuned!

Canon has just published a study showing that half of the Swedish employees waste about 4000 Euros or 6000 USD per employee and year searching for information. The conclusion was drawn after interviewing over 1000 people of which over half used more than 10 hours per month looking for information. A quarter of the subjects in the study said that they spent up to 20 hours. These are very interesting numbers that show how profitable an investment in Findability can be.

Link to the article (only in Swedish)