Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

New challenges and leaders in the segment of Enterprise Search 2007

September 16 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The yearly magic quadrant for Information Access Technology from Gartner has become an important way to evaluate the vendors in Enterprise Search business. The result is presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.

For the last couple of years the upper right corner, which includes the leaders, has been a yearly fight between FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity (which was bought by Autonomy in 2005) and Endeca.

However, the magic quadrant for 2007 shows that there is a substantial change in the market and two new leaders as well as two new large vendors on the challenging spot are represented. (more…)

Maria Johansson

How many users can you afford to annoy?

September 12 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

The second keynote at the Human Computer Interaction conference in Lancaster was given by Jared Spool who talked about Breaking through the invisible walls of usability research. Jared is a very inspiring and entertaining speaker. If you have the chance to listen to him, take it!

One of the things he talked about was the fact that the usability techniques that are widely used today were in fact not designed for large amounts of users. We have all kinds of data about the users’ behaviors online, but can we really use that data in a productive way? As Jared said; there is a big difference between data and information, we don’t know what inferences to make from the data we have.
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Maria Johansson

The Multitasking Man

September 7 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

The first Keynote on this years British HCI conference was by Stephen Payne who talked about task switching and studying of multiple texts. He talked about how users use different strategies to find the information they’re looking for and how it is important to give clues to which content is the most relevant.

So in this world that’s overloaded with information, how do you choose the best text? (more…)

Maria Johansson

Usability 2.0

September 3 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

A lot is happening in the world of enterprise search. Recent blog posts include discussions of how enterprise 2.0 tools can be integrated into corporate systems; see discussions of taxonomies or integration on Social Glass for example. Or take a look at Bill Ives examples of people who achieved success with E 2.0, on the FAST Forward blog.

These new trends are also starting to affect how we talk about usability. A couple of months ago there was a seminar about how web 2.0 technology have consequences for usability. (Watch the video from the seminar Usability 2.0.)

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Helge Legernes

The evolution of search in video media

June 27 - 2007 | Helge Legernes

Search is becoming more and more an infrastructure necessity and in some areas, and for some users, considered a commodity. However, the evolution of new areas for use of search is growing rapidly both on the web and within the enterprises. Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube is giving us one example of new areas. Searching in video material is not simple and I believe we have just seen the very early stage of this new technique. (more…)

Maria Johansson

Challenges for the interaction design community

June 18 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

I attended the conference Business to Buttons in Malmö last week. Two very interesting days with lots of seminars and discussions with colleagues. Amongst many other things I attended a workshop about the future of media interfaces and got some interesting new ideas. (more…)

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