The Well and the Cathedral

It didn’t take long working the desk before a person came looking for a book based on its appearance. I think the first time this happened it went something like:

“There’s this book I’m looking for. It’s for school. The cover is kind of… Salmon colored.”
“Ok- was it a story or was it a book about facts?” (This is code for “Fiction or nonfiction?”)
“Um, I think it was a story. The cover was… I guess… More orange than pink.”

This is a pretty regular occurance at the fiction desk. It turns out that people search the internet in much the same way. These studies, as reported in MIT’s Technology Review, shows that when people want to revisit a page they’d seen before, they do not go through the browser history. And when they do search for the previously visited webpage, presenting users with images of previously visited webpages give them just enough information about the look and feel of the page that they can more easily find it again. Also in the article is a reference to pollination:

Spool says that the ideas behind the prototype history tool are likely to filter into consumer products in a very different form. “What we’re seeing here is the first piece of the pollination process,” he says.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 6:46 am and is filed under information organization, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.