Yahoo! Search Pad was released last week without much ado, certainly not to the kind of media buzz surrounding Google and MS announcements. Search Pad collects documents you click on in search results, and allows you to annotate them with notes. The interface, while simple, is not necessarily easy to figure out. It took me some time to poke around and figure out how it works. It some ways, it is similar to Bing’s history mechanism. It’s more useful than the history mechanism because it allows the user to type notes or copy pieces of documents into the Search Pad to help with document triage and other recall-oriented aspects of exploratory search. On the other hand, the history mechanism works in a more intuitive way, and keeps track of documents you’ve already seen when you re-visit a query.
Bing’s history is also relatively unobtrusive: it is designed to sit next to search results (or in a separate window) rather than as an overlay. Search Pad gets in the user’s way because when it’s open, the search results are not accessible. Search Pad’s layout wants to take over the screen even though it wastes a lot of space in a wide window, and could have easily been sized to appear next to the search results without impending access to them. Instead, it requires the user to open and close it all the time, even on a large screen. Opening it in a second window doesn’t work because the data are not synchronized between windows. Clicking outside the Search Pad overlay (say on a partially-visible link) simply closes the Search Pad.
This modal interface seems like a poor design choice, and I am surprised that it passed the usability assessments that should have been part of the beta deployment. If the results window is not used for a while (for example, while you’re reading a document you found), Search Pad goes modal (which makes me want to go postal) by putting up a “search session will expire soon” message to which I need to respond to continue using the notebook. This is another example of a poorly-designed user experience, something uncharacteristic of other Yahoo! interfaces.
I much prefer to use something like MS OneNote (installed on my laptop) to organize my search results because it doesn’t interfere with the browser interface, is agnostic to which search engine I use, and allows me to organize and manage my results in much more flexible ways. OneNote automatically records the URL from which I copied something, allowing me to track my sources easily. While OneNote doesn’t integrate with Twitter, it does allow me to share content in real time with other collaborators using OneNote.
Comparing OneNote to these web-based tools points out the differences in design philosophy that underlies them: web-based tools, even ones ostensibly designed for interaction, still focus more on the mechanics of moving data around. Desktop applications such as OneNote, on the other hand, focus on the interaction, with some attention paid to the data sharing.
Search Pad is Yahoo!’s foray into the HCIR space that also includes Bing’s history mechanism and Google Squared, on which I commented earlier. It’s great to see these companies increase the range of interaction available to people looking for information. Unfortunately, these tools are still in the category of afterthoughts rather than considered designs to support exploratory search. Let’s hope that lack of adoption (due to usability problems) does not discourage search service providers from continuing to improve their HCIR tool sets.
ha – id not even seen this. interesting. It sounds from your experience like its pretty annoying. but good to see some more industry examples of schraefel’s hunter gatherer type work.
Google used to have a product called “Notebook” that did something similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Notebook
But they went in the opposite direction, and discontinued it. Many are still wondering why, as anyone who actually used the service really liked it.
Thanks for the reminder about Google Notebook. I just went back and played with Google Notebook. It has the advantage that you can open it in a separate window (although you need large displays) and drag contents to it. To make drop work right, you first have to click on the notebook page to put it into insert mode, and then you need to drop the clipping just so onto the left end of the input box; otherwise the notebook page will be replaced by the page from which you dragged your clipping. Oddly, it does not save the URL from which the drop occurred (as MS OneNote does), but it does allow you to grab contents.