On Oct 5, 2009, at 8:03 PM, David Hatch wrote:
From Alok Jain: "Search requires recall of sorts, there is a
decision required on how to form the query and more. Browsing on
the other hand is more on the recognition side." I like this and
would add that there is much less cognitive muscle required on the
part of the user to point and say "that" when presented with the
proper stimulus than to formulate a question (a higher order
skill). That said, there are only so many "thats" we can generate
for users to click on which comes to the whole browse nav not
scaling very well thing.
This reminds me of an insight Rashmi Sinha had about tagging quite
some time back.
http://rashmisinha.com/2005/09/27/a-cognitive-analysis-of-tagging/
Rashmi's argument is kind of the opposite of Alok's.
Instead of category recognition being easier, it might actually be
harder because it forces people to translate between what they have in
their head and what the site has in its navigation. In other words,
you have to make a decision (sometimes several decisions) about which
category your thing is in.
Search, on the other hand, takes advantage of what you already
know...the words in your head. All you have to do is type them in. I
would argue that "how to form a query" is an overstated problem...a
bigger problem might be "find your term in this pile of terms".
Of course, the primary difference between tagging and search is that
when you refind something with tags you're actually comparing your
current tag with past tags that you have created. In search you're
comparing your search term with the site's terms, so there isn't any
of *you* in the set. (This is why creating search systems is so
hard...nobody is saying it is easy)
So it's not clear that browsing is any easier than searching from a
cognitive standpoint. In the same way that Rashmi describes tagging as
"eliminating the decision of choosing the right category" search also
"eliminates the decision of choosing the right category"...it doesn't
force the user to do any matching between what's in their head and
what's on the site. Search engines, when done well, does that matching
for them.
Josh
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