Maybe I’m overly-sensitized because I just finished a site search project and am working on a report design presentation for Emetrics but it occurs to me that there are a few similarities between the approaches to site search and reports.

1. Both are designed to drive action
In search, we are providing information to our users in order to drive them deeper into the site, to purchase, to sign-up, etc. In report design we are providing information to our users that drive them to improve the usability of their site, to optimize the shopping cart process, to develop great content that users will come back for again and again.

2. Both strive to reduce huge volumes of data into manageable pieces
Search relies on an index - typically a huge flat file of all the URLs on your site that it can find along with all the associated meta data. Reports (typically) rely on a database of some kind but in the end, to goal of search and reports is to make that unimaginably large dataset understandable and useful.

3. Both are short-cuts or crutches
Reports seek to distill all that data and that learning that the web analyst has in her head to meaningful information so that the end users don’t also have to be web analysts to take action against the data. Search allows users (hopefully) to circumvent the standard site navigation in order to more quickly arrive at the information or location they desire.

We could, of course, list out some other similarities or many, many differences but the 3 statements above are concepts that I have applied equally well (or poorly) to search and report design.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 6:44 pm and is filed under visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.