I’ve had an interesting few months advancing my understanding of search from combined information architecture and user experience perspectives.

It has been strangely self-referential, watching myself search about search.
Specifically, I created a battery of searches of different types, and checked my actual behaviours against the reference behaviours I encountered in the literature.

How did it turn out?  Well, I agreed and disagreed to various degrees, and came up with my own distillation that would be useful to me as a consultant and solutions designer.  Of course, this is exactly what the literature said I would do, and even gave it the name “sensemaking”.

So stay tuned as we explore such topics as information foraging, information scent, and sensemaking.  I personally found these to be very thought provoking, and hope you will too.