The goal of this diploma project was to study patterns, behaviour and strategies used by people in finding information for shopping, jobs and travel needs. I looked at these verticals as they spanned over multiple sessions. I also looked closely at the nature of information: local, commercial, latest-is-relevant and the like. Finally, I also spent considerable time looking at the verticals for finding behaviour that was highly social in nature (in Indian context). The project was about helping evolve the search engines to better understand the context, and create UIs for search that have a sense of time, context and some amount of personalisation.

I conducted field studies with interviews and observation of the search behaviour while the users were on their current information seeking projects… like trying to find a product to purchase, or job or even plan a trip.

I handled the project by myself in all phases, from literature study to finally drawing up the personas and visualizing the ideas, with guidance and many feedback sessions from Yahoo! User experience design team.

My key learning has been about designing user studies, and having a steady flow in collecting valuable insights. Exploring the field of search and web domain has been very exciting too. But, the part I enjoyed most was analysis of the huge amounts of fuzzy data, coming out with patterns and user strategies, and creating smart simple ideas based on them.