[IxDA Discuss] Number of search results to display

[Peter Boersma]

Robert wrote:
> The magic number is not a number, it's *speed*.

Allow me to give an example where speed was not the magic bullet:
Two years ago I worked with a team that was designing the interface for a scientific search engine. At some point the developers came with the suggestion to put the time it took to search the massive database on the screen. The designers thought it might impress the users and agreed. The developers were so proud! A search on "rhematic +inflammable -bechterew" yielded over 1400 results and was produced in 0.91 seconds!

The users hated it. They could not believe that a computer could search ALL the references the company advertised it searched through in so little time (especially since they probably had been looking everywhere manually for weeks). They did not trust the results and abandoned the search engine.

As soon as the results from the next round of usability tests came in, the feature was gone.

This target group was willing to wait (I always said they'd wait a day or a week if they had to) and be sure that the search had yielded ALL relevant results. They would refine their search later on (for example by looking at the years in which the most references were made to a particular article and zoom in on those). They were not there for the first couple of hits, they wanted ALL hits.

Peter
-- 
Peter Boersma | Senior Interaction Designer | Info.nl
http://www.peterboersma.com/blog | http://www.info.nl