A Flickr Collection of Search Patterns

Lou Rosenfeld of Bloug fame alerted me to a great collection of screenshots from different web sites that focuses on different search and search results patterns. It's cool to see a set of examples that allows designers to see how other sites provide search interaction without having to "root around" on the web. Peter Morville deserves credit for putting this collection together...what a great way to use Flickr!

View the Flickr Collection of Search Patterns

The collection includes examples of:
- Best Bets
- Faceted Navigation
- Auto-suggest
- Search Result Clustering
- Structured Search Results
- Search Result Pagination
- Advanced Search
- Social Search
- Enterprise Search
- Local Search
- Mobile Search
...and many others

Related Posts:
- Polishing your diamond search results

Delighting Customers - Article - Apogee

What does it take to delight customers?

My good friend Dan from Apogee in Hong Kong posted a nice, succinct article on how to delight your customers.

Of course, it's not a big stretch from delighting customers to delighting employees, volunteers, members, or other "users". But if you're reading this you probably already realize that Dan's maxim can be applied broadly when designing.

You'll note that Dan doesn't include "follow usability guidelines." In my experience, practicing User-Centered Design produces better results than strict adherance to guidelines. (Of course both together work extra-well.)

Related Posts:
- The Pursuit of Simplicity
- The trouble with usability guidelines