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Changing the Experience of Search, or Why Am I at Viewzi?
Posted Tuesday June 24, 2008

So, a bit about my ‘not-so-new-anymore’ gig.

As some of you already know, I joined Viewzi, a small startup in the Dallas area, back in mid-December. For various reasons, it was a fairly quiet transition. Why? For starters, it’s been a busy time!! I’ve also been speaking and writing more on topics that didn’t seem consistent with my being at a startup, topics pertaining to management, design thinking, being a corporate change agent, social design, innovative thinkers... Topics more fitting of a consultant or director at a large company (exactly the positions I had prior to this, which afforded me the experiences to write and speak about such things). Just as investors consider the financial investment they make in a startup, I’ve had to consider the professional investment I’m making. “How is this furthering my career?” Honestly, I struggled a bit with this. But in the end, I chose to invest myself in Viewzi because it’s something I really believe in (more on that in a moment).

That said, my biggest hesitation in not being more vocal has been a personal struggle to find the deep rooted story that gets someone truly fired up.

On the surface, there are a ton of cool things going on at Viewzi. Our product manager Jay Horne sums these things up rather nicely as ‘food, folks, and fun’. From Viewzi cafe on Fridays to getting to work with some of the best talent I know, to a really fun work environment and a fun product-- there’s plenty to love. But these aren’t the things that keep a curious, passionate learner around for the long haul. As I mentioned earlier, one of the most critical things a leader can do is to find that ‘story’ that gives everyone a sense of purpose in their role. The “we’re putting a man on the moon” message that gets everyone up in the morning and gives context and meaning to all the exciting and mundane tasks that will be required of you.

For me, I have to have a vision and a passion for the idea. To be clear, I’ve had various stories I’ve been trying out, but these weren’t the deep-rooted motivation I was searching for. It wasn’t until we started looking at the feedback and taking a long hard look at our core message that I finally ‘found’ my story, why I am here. And here’s the ironic part— it’s the same message I’ve been giving for the last 3 years…

“It’s all about experiences”
In 2006, I developed a model for understanding where exactly a product is in its maturity. Think of this as a ‘UX hierarchy of needs,’ with six levels ranging from useful/functional up to meaningful (the highest level a product can achieve). This was my way of resolving a lot of different ideas around what makes up an experience, and the relative priority of those things:

Moving from bottom to top, you have a basic product maturity continuum:

Functional
Ideas typically start off as functional solutions to a problem— something useful. Think of the first Motorola cell phone. Sure, it was a brick, but it allowed you to make calls untethered to a fixed spot!

Reliable
From there, things have to be reliable. This can be reliability of the service (5 9’s uptime?) as well as integrity of the data. If I purchase tickets on a travel site, the ticket prices need to be current and reliable. If I host with a site, I need to know my data is backed up and accessible at all times. This is reliability.

Usable & Convenient
It’s not enough to allow me to simply do something— it has to eventually be less awkward to use. This is where the next two levels, usable and convenient, come into play. I draw a distinction between usability and convenience. Both make something easier to use, but in my experience most usability groups focus on fixing known problems— removing the hurdles. A focus on convenience asks “is there a more natural way to make this work?” MapQuest and Google Maps are a great example of this contrast. MapQuest was perfectly usable. But Google Maps, with it’s draggable interface, physics, and other more ‘natural’ behaviors was a much more convenient way to interact with maps data.

Pleasurable
Whereas convenience focuses on cognition, the next level— ‘pleasurable’— focuses on affect and emotions. How can we make something emotionally engaging? (And a memorable experience!) This is typically accomplished through things like friendly language, aesthetics, humor, arousing curiosity, creating flow, leveraging game mechanics and other similar tactics.

Meaningful
The highest level is of course ‘meaning. And no, you can’t make something meaningful— that’s a personal area. But you can design for meaning by focusing on the preceding levels as well as shepherding beliefs and the communities surrounding the product or service experience. Also, whereas the other levels build on each other, a product can be meaningful without any of these levels (I have a 1966 Karmann Ghia that doesn’t even run— ‘function’; sheer ownership connects me with a group of people in a way that is meaningful to me).

The big takeaway from this is that if want to truly create a revolutionary product, you have to shift you’re thinking from a ‘bottom-up’ task focus (which will only get you so far) to a focus that starts from the ‘top-down’ with the experience you want people to have. By approaching things from this perspective we see a host of new ideas, not to mention better ways to implement the same ideas that have been around for a while.

But there’s another takeaway: In mature markets, where you have stable, usable products, taking it to the ‘next level’ means focusing on more experiential things like emotions, clever language, aesthetics. This was the topic of my pleasurable interface presentation, where I gathered dozens of examples of these experiential qualities:

But search?
So, all that’s nice. But what about a search engine? Can a utility tool like search offer an improved experience? And I’m not talking about the algorithms or the results themselves. But the experience of interacting with the search results themselves. Can, or should, searching for information be a fun activity?

The problem with search:
Travis has written an excellent and accurate description of Viewzi. I encourage you to read his explanation of what we’re about. But for the purposes of this post (and to understand why I am so excited by what we are doing at Viewzi), here’s a short description of what we are doing…

Viewzi is changing the face of search. Literally. We’re asking the question: Is there more than one way to look at search? Does everyone see things the same way?

With traditional text-based search engines, no matter what or how you search, your results are delivered the same way. Searching for “Bono” looks the same as searching for “chicken recipes” or “sports cars.”

We think there are better ways to present information than in a simple list. We start with specific topics or search terms and ask: “Is there a better way to present this data?” The result? Dozens of new, unique ‘views’, or ways to look at information, each custom-tailored for that content. It’s the right data, presented in the right way.

Changing the experience of search
When I first described Viewzi to my friend and mentor Rob Moore, he commented with some enthusiasm “you’re changing the experience of search. Most search folks I know are still focused on how to improve the performance by a few milliseconds. No one has really focused on how people actually interact with the data being returned.” (Or something like that!)

Rob nailed it on the head. We’re changing the experience of search. More specifically, we’re changing the experience of searching for [insert topic of choosing or manner of searching]. Contrary to some of the press that is going around, we are not a visual search engine, not exactly. We do place a premium on aesthetic considerations. However, we’re more about the right data presented in the right way. I like to think of ourselves as a designing custom search results for very specific scenarios. I was excited when Brian Oberkirch asked: ‘what can Stephen Anderson do with hyper-niched search contexts?’ That’s exactly it!

With Viewzi you can, eventually, experience search results however you prefer. On one end, this could be a crazy digg labs style visualization. On the other end, you could have something very much like Google, but with ‘that one little change’ you’ve always wanted. Think of Viewzi as ‘search results, exactly the way you want, how you want.’
We are really the platform upon which hundreds of ways to view information will eventually reside. We currently have 17 views, with many more planned. Some are “all purpose” search views (different ways to view and interact with general search results) and many more are specific to a niche topic (recipes, music, celebrity photos).

Here is an example of what I mean by scenario-based search views:

Searching for recipes
Here is what you get if you search for ‘chicken recipes’ on most search engines.

If our goal was simply to create better search results, you’d get little more than some light typographic treatment, or perhaps some subtle information design changes. Hardly the stuff of dreams. But, if you change the question to something based in the experiences people have, in this case ‘how can I make searching for recipes more enjoyable?’, you might end up with something like our current recipe view:

I’ll be the first to say, this is one of my favorite search views. It is (for many contexts) a far superior way to search for recipes. But is this the best way to display recipe search results? No. This view supports the offline behavior of flipping through a book to discover an appetizing recipe. But what about the scenario where…

• someone has 4 ingredients on hand and they want to find a recipe that uses those ingredients

• someone is focused on finding recipes that fit certain nutritional criteria

The resulting recipe view for these scenarios would be (a) quite different and (b) much less visual, as we would focus more on ingredients than appetizing photos. This is what I mean by search results custom-tailored for specific people, activities and contexts. And from this perspective, you can easily image dozens of different recipes views, many of which we will never think of, which leads me to my final though…

“But wait, there’s more…”
So far, I’ve only described the search views we are creating. But it’s ridiculous to think that a bunch of designers and tech geeks might know everything there is to know about [you name it]. The bigger story is the search platform we are creating, a platform that will allow anyone to create their own search views. For now, it’s an API than anyone with Flash AS3 or JavaScript skills can start using right away. In the future, we’d like to enable anyone to begin creating their own search views. That, is exciting. Whether it’s a better niche view or an entirely different way to experience search results— we’re building the platform that will enable user-generated (viewzer generated?) search views.

Pleasurable Interfaces + Search
And here’s why I am so fired up about Viewzi: everything I was talking about in the upper half of my pyramid— taking usable products and making them more convenient, pleasurable and meaningful— that’s exactly what I’m responsible for at Viewzi. I get to test out these ideas in a maturing field that is ripe for a focus on better experiences. When was the last time you described a search engine as fun? Viewzi is a company who’s business model is precisely that— to make search a pleasurable experience!

It’s a crude comment, but more than a few people have described Viewzi as the“‘iPhone of search.” If we can do for search what the iPhone did for mobile phones—change how people do what they’ve been doing for a decade—wow. Now that’s something I can believe in!

What about you?