HCL 2.0 » Search Analytics http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hcl20 \"The Web is unlocked--resistance is futile.\" Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:45:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Search Analytics http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hcl20/2007/05/04/search-analytics/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hcl20/2007/05/04/search-analytics/#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 17:18:59 +0000 hcl20 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hcl20/2007/05/04/search-analytics/ NOTES

  • Web design should involve ongoing conversations with your customers
  • Search is an experience, just like navigating
  • Studies show half of all people go first to search box
  • Google has trained users to trust search box; to use short word search
  • Most users don’t start on home page; we DON’T control how they access our info
  • DON’T obsess over web site being perfect
  • Can’t construct every search, but can control how the most sought after info is discovered/delivered to customers
  • Devote resources to hand constructing most important searches using a database
  • See Duke University home page – http://www.duke.edu/ – for an example. The blue navigation bar in the bottom half of the page contains the items that reserach showed are heaviest searched pages. A custom database was designed to manage those particular searches to ensure users can find what they want.

QUESTIONS

Do you have suggestions for revising the Search box on the HCL home page?

Is there a value in putting research guides into a database so that they could be searched in a variety of ways?

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