IEEE works! But what works?
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
A few weeks back, I wrote about the innovative faceted search UI at IEEE’s new IEEE Xplore Digital Library site. Qualitatively, it seemed like a particularly strong implementation, but now there are metrics. Yesterday, Gerry Grenier, IEEE’s director of publishing technologies, tweeted their first results:
Since our launch of Xplore 3.0 on Feb 13 we have seen sustained *170%* increase in searches. Endeca Guided Navigation is the reason.
(Gerry was gracious to give Endeca so much credit in 140 characters. Thanks! Deployments this good are always a partnership of technology, design, process, etc., so kudus back to the IEEE team.)
But the question is, why is it working so well? And before we can even ask that, we need to ask what is working so well? Is it the innovative facet widgets — sliders, breadcrumbs, multi-select? Their interaction? Something else? As Daniel Tunkelang reminds us, we’re all still new at measuring the effects of HCIR, given the “battle royale” between the IR camp and its reliance on batch evaluation, the IS camp and its reliance on user studies, and the challenge of reconciling the two.
IEEE’s mission is to innovate, so I hope we’ll get to capture some of these lessons.
