Name: Angela Luong
Date: February 5th, 2023
Table of contents
Google Search is a tool that we use excessively in our daily lives. We use it as a gateway to the seemingly endless information on the internet. In most cases Google can give us exactly what we need with a single search, but sometimes it can take more time to find what we need. This is the case with more specific and/or complex questions. Usually answers can not be found on a single webpage, but effort needs to be made to piece together information from different locations online/offline. This is can be a challenging and time-consuming process.
Academic researchers regularly engage in this kind of search process. They are people who carry out academic or scientific research with the goal to gain more knowledge*.* Researchers go through this process for hours at a time. They look at tens to hundreds of sources until they can piece together an answer to their research question. Usually they use search engines and libraries like Google Scholar. This is a subsidiary of Google Search that solely focuses on looking up academic texts.
Fig. 1: Logo of Google Scholar
This way of searching has been a recent development in the academic world. In the past, only a small number of researchers had access to a limited amount of information, which they could only look up manually. This luckily has changed due to the internet. This recent evolution in information distribution and retrieval has created an interesting design problem. Questions that come up are: what kind of information system can we design that best facilitates the distribution of large amounts of data? and: how can we best design a user interface that supports efficient information retrieval? These questions have already been tackled by many designers in the recent past, which has led to successful products like Google Search and Scholar. However, using these products does not guarantee an easy and fast search process. Many problems in its design are present, such as irrelevant search results, unclear visual design and the absence of the explanation of its features. Being led by the assumptions that improvements are always possible to be made, I took it upon myself to research these products and users to create an improved redesign of Google Scholar.
In this design rationale I will be discussing my research done on Google Scholar and my target audience and present a solution that has the potential to change researchers’ ways of using Google Scholar.
The job of a researcher has always consisted of finding and retrieving information that are scattered throughout multiple locations, whether it be on or offline. This task requires a lot of skill and knowledge about the subject at hand and is usually time-consuming. This process has changed drastically through the invention of the internet and subsequently, search engines. Researchers no longer needed to skim through hundreds of hefty books and papers, but could instead look through its pages with a press of a button. Moreover, because the publishing process no longer needed a lengthy production timeline, academic content could be created much quicker. Thus, this invention also has lead to an exponential growth in academic content through the means of electronic publishing (Dumon, 2013). Because of this and the complicated nature of this search process, having an effective system to find and retrieve information has never before been as important.
Although many products have been developed to facilitate such a search process, the most popular one being Google Scholar, they only have been partially successful in giving the researchers a user-friendly experience. Through my research I have been able to identify a number of problems researchers have when using Google Scholar.
The algorithm and the interface design The two components that are at play in this problem is Google Scholar's algorithms and its interface design. An algorithm is a complex system that ranks the most relevant pages for all search queries. It does this by considering various factors such as quality, relevance or usability of each page. These algorithms are designed by highly skilled engineers (Pavlik, 2022). In short, this means that an algorithm decides what results and in which order users receive after entering a search query.
Google Search’s interface are the pages people get to see when they type in a search query and look at the results. It is a visual representation of the search results that the algorithm presents to the user. It is important that this is well designed so users are able to find what they are looking for. These interfaces are designed by interaction and visual designers. This component will be the main focus of this project.
In the next sections I will be discussing my target audience in more detail to explain who they are, what their goals are and what frustrations they face when using Google Scholar. I will also be doing an in-depth analysis to pinpoint the exact problems with the interface and to figure out what the opportunities of improvements are.
<aside> 🔎 Summary: The search process of an academic researcher is a complicated and time-consuming task. Because of the invention of the internet and search engines, this process has become easier. Moreover, this also means that there has been a massive influx of academic content. Thus, it has become all the more important to have an effective and user-friendly interface to accommodate for these two factors, so researchers can reach its goals.
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