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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: May 18, 2002 Jared Spool, a Man with a Task -- "He's been able to show that download times are (within limits) irrelevant to users' satisfaction in using the Web. Satisfaction correlates with successful task completion – not in itself surprising – but he has found that so does the belief that the sites are faster and, for ecommerce sites, also cheaper."
Reader Comments...
He also thinks search isn't as important as IA on sites. Just imagine Amazon.com with a well-designed taxonomy but no search facility. I rest my case. Posted by: MadMan on May 19, 2002 01:11 PM
IIRC from his fuller paper, Spool (or his firm) said that search was more important in some instances than in others... Sites where offerings were complex or very numerous were among the instances. I -don't- recall whether or not he said search was more important than IA in those instances. A well-rounded perspective, I think, would rely on the O'Reilly perspective in "IA for the WWW". That is, site designers should support both browsing and directed tasks. You need a good IA for those who want to browse, and you need good search for those who *want* to search. Spool's arguments that search is bad because it frequently works badly (e.g., doesn't support synonyms or misspellings) isn't really an indictment of search so much as its implementation. On my site, people use both the IA and the search function. I can't complain about them choosing one or the other - - a couple levels down, you hit a very detailed architecture (there are abut 500 pages) - - but reading my logs I can frequently figure out what people are after, and having both seems to help. Getting rid of search is not an alternative. Not on -my- site, anyway. Posted by: Frank Lynch on May 19, 2002 09:20 PM
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