Searching for Answers
by Michael
There's a new web service that has its sites on some of the Google and Wikipedia market. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine" but the interface it presents looks like any other search engine. And that's the problem.
When the home page first loads, your first instinct is to type in a search query and hit enter. But the results returned are anything but helpful. If your query generates no results, you get a page that has samples of queries that SHOULD work for the site. Clearly the folks behind W|A need to re-think their design. If you are going to present a user with a search box, and then give them zero results AND tell them how they should have searched, not only are you breaking user expectations, you are insulting the user as well.
They have obviously invested an enormous amount of time and resources designing and developing this service. But it seems obvious that they haven't spent very much time on user testing. If they had, they would not need to have primer on how to use what appears to be a simple and familiar service to begin with. I don't think they have to go back to the drawing board, but they do need to reconsider what it is they want the user to accomplish and then create an interface that helps the user succeed.
Posted under Caught in the Web on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 14:36
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