Search for people who don't know the architect
In the test week, 312 people searched the Register. Six percent searched by architect. Forty-one percent typed a nickname or a description, like "the crinkly roof" or "that round one by the canal". How we built search for the way people actually remember buildings.
In August we put a test version of the Register's website in front of real people: the volunteers, their friends, and anyone on the Saturday walks who would take a card with the address on it. Then we watched the search logs for a week.
There were 312 searches. We had expected people to search the way the card index is organised: by official name, by architect, by year. Here is what they actually typed.
6% searched by architect. Most of those were Declan.
19% searched by official name, and about half of those got it slightly wrong.
41% typed a nickname or a description: "the accordion", "crinkly roof bus station", "that round one by the canal", "the church that looks like a tent".
22% searched by street.
The rest typed a style. We counted eleven spellings of brutalist, including "brutallist", "brutelist" and, our favourite, "brutal lest".
People don't remember buildings by their names. They remember what the building looks like, and where it is.
Names, plural
The most important search decision was made back in May, in the modelling workshop, when we decided a building has a list of other names, not a single name. Search treats every name in that list as equal to the official one. Type "accordion" and you get the bus station, with the official name on top and a small line under it: also known as the Accordion.
That small line matters. It tells people they are right, and tells them what the building is actually called, without making them feel they asked wrong.
The volunteers add names as they hear them. By the end of the test week the bus station had six. Sorcha added "the paper fan" after a child on Walk 3 called it that, and two people searched for it the following Saturday.
Typos and near misses
People search on a phone, standing on a pavement, often with one hand. Search forgives one or two wrong letters in a word, more in longer words, so "brutallist" finds brutalist and "Kavanah" finds Kavanagh.
We also stopped short words from matching too eagerly. In the first version, typing "bus" found everything with "business" in its description, which was most of the office blocks. Now short words have to match a whole word.
Descriptions
"That round one by the canal" was the hardest kind of search, and the most common kind of letter Úna gets. We didn't try to make search understand it. Instead, we made sure the words people use are in the content.
Each building's description now includes a plain sentence about its shape and setting, written by Úna in the style guide's voice: "A round, four-storey office building on the bank of the Grand Canal." Search reads descriptions as well as names, at a lower weight. "Round canal" now finds three buildings, and the right one is first.
Streets and walks
A fifth of searches were streets. Type a street name and you get the street first, with its buildings in order along it, the way a walk would pass them. Jens built that page, and it became the most-used page in the test week after the building page itself.
What search doesn't do
It doesn't guess. If nothing matches, it says so, and suggests searching by street instead, because that almost always works. We tested a version that showed "buildings you might mean" for empty results, and people found it more confusing than helpful.
And it doesn't search Declan's notes. We tried. Notes are full of words like "door", "light" and "concrete", and they matched everything. Notes are for reading, once you've found the building.
The phone without signal
All of this runs on the server, which is fine on a street with signal. Under the Accordion's roof, there is none. That's the next post.
