Navigate, don't search

But when designing an interface for finding a note in a small pile of personal notes, or building an app to organize a small team’s working documents, most of the “finding stuff” interface ideas are in play. It’s in these situations where I want to make the argument:  prefer interfaces that let the user incrementally move towards the right ans

Humans are much better at choosing between a few options than conjuring an answer from scratch. We’re also much better at incrementally approaching the right answer by pointing towards the right direction than nailing the right search term from the beginning. When it’s possible to take a “type in a query” kind of interface and make it more incremen

In some cases, the right interface idea is obvious. For example, when you’re Google trying to make the entire web accessible, you can’t expect people to learn some monstrous cataloging system of folders to find what they need. There probably exists no tagging system comprehensive enough to cover the entire web, either. So the natural choice is the

Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.

I’ve been pondering this gap between one-shot and incremental information-finding interfaces in the context of knowledge tools recently. Text search boxes are easy to design and easy to add to apps. But I think their ease on developers may be leading us to ignore potential interface ideas that could let us discover better ideas, faster.

Incremental filtering interfaces also shine when the search space isn’t something that can easily be verbalized into keywords, like photo or audio search, or medical images.

On the other side of the spectrum are interfaces for approaching what exactly you’re looking for  incrementally  – links and recommendation systems. With these, you may not start exactly where you want to be, but with every click you can tell whether you’re getting closer or farther. Over time, not only are you likely to stumble into what