“I’m Feeling Lucky” — Building Great Search Experiences for Today’s Users
Introduction

Hello! Today I want to talk to you about designing and building great search experiences for your users.

But before I do that, I need to tell you a little about myself. In 2010, I joined the nascent UX team at Wolfram Research in Champaign, Ill. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with Wolfram, it is a math and science software company. Wolfram is, perhaps, best known for creating Wolfram Alpha , the knowledge engine was one of the earliest data partners in Siri. Even today, WolframAlpha powers the answers to many factual and computational questions on platforms like Siri and Alexa. As UX Manager, I oversaw the team tasked with thinking about user experience for this new kind of search-ish experience.

Then, in 2014, I joined NPR, where I’ve had the opportunity to work across our product portfolio, including NPR.org, NPR One, and many of the journalist-facing tools and services that power those platforms. And while I’ve been here, I’ve worked on several search- and search-adjacent projects… but we’ll get into that in a little bit.

First, let’s go back in time:

So, 20 years ago, NPR was talking about Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista, HotBot. And how well they did — or didn’t — work. Clearly, the players involved have changed and the technology has evolved, and yet we still wonder if search is delivering the experiences that we expect for our users.

Now, I have a question for you: Take a moment, and think about the last time you searched for something online. For most of you, I’m guessing that was in the last 24–48 hours.

Let me ask you: how many of you thought about using a search experience from Google or Amazon? And remember: Google also means asking a question of Google Assistant on your phone or searching on YouTube, and Amazon also means asking Alexa a question or searching to watch on Prime Video. These two companies, among other technology stalwarts, are changing our user’s expectations when it comes to search, and it’s up to us to keep up with the search experiences that we build into our products.

Now, here’s some good news: Although the landscape is changing, the core user needs for search systems still remain remarkably consistent. Take, for instance, this definition from Jakob Nielsen:
['Daniel Newman']
['Search', 'Voice Assistant', 'Process', 'Iac19', 'Design']