The Hong Kong and China web usability project starts from a single statement – we want to simiplify our information architecture and content structure. It sounds so simple and direct! Yet TG at Kelikuru.com found the site has hardly any quantitative data support or it has not done any solid qualitative studies before. Trying to improve its usability and user flow is quite a challenge.

In the process of finding a user-centric solution for the web project, TG starts thinking from the basic in an attempt to understand the target users: who they are, where they are coming from, what they are looking for, how they look for information.

The subject of ”Modes of Information Seeking“ becomes an important piece of information after reviewing some user-centric-design articles and books. It ends up to be a theoretical guiding light for TG redefining the structure despite the fact that we have to make a lot of assumptions and testings.  

Here’s what TG make notes of:

6 primary user ehaviors in information seeking: Founded by David Eliis, professor at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, he came up with

  • Starting: identifying relevant sources of interest
  • Chaining: following and connecting new leads found in an initial source
  • Browsing: scanning contents of identified sources for subject affinity
  • Differentiating: filtering and assessing sources for usefulness
  • Monitoring: keeping abreast of developments in a given subject area
  • Extracting: systematically working through a given source for material of interest 

Scale of Browsing models: Founded by Gary Marchionni, professor of information and library science  at the University of North Carolina, he came up with a scale of browsing models, TG, however, regroups them for my own convenience. Like Gary said, these modes are not mutually exclusive.

Browsing Mode

“Mode of Information seeking” apparently is not new as many user research studies of traditional academic models are found ever since 1980. Yet its seems to work for one ultimate goal-Time Optimization. To save time for searching for right or relevant information as we are encountering the information explosion and lost-in-hyperspace problems.

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