Search User Interfaces (SUIs) represent the gateway between people who have a task to complete
and the repositories of information and data stored around the world. Not surprisingly
therefore there are many communities who have a vested interest in the way SUIs are designed.
There are people who study how humans search for information and people who study how humans
use computers. There are people who study good user interface design and people who design
aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. There are also people who curate and manage valuable
information resources and people who design effective algorithms to retrieve results from
them. While it would be easy for one community to reject another for their limited ability to
design a good SUI the truth is that they all can and they all have made valuable
contributions. Fundamentally therefore we must accept that designing a great SUI means
leveraging the knowledge and skills from all of these communities. The aim of this book is to
at least acknowledge if not integrate all of these perspectives to bring the reader into a
multidisciplinary mindset for how we should think about SUI design. Further this book aims to
provide the reader with a framework for thinking about how different innovations each
contribute to the overall design of a SUI. With this framework and a multidisciplinary
perspective in hand the book then continues by reviewing: early successful established and
experimental concepts for SUI design. The book then concludes by discussing how we can analyse
and evaluate the on-going developments in SUI design as this multidisciplinary area of
research moves forwards. Finally in reviewing these many SUIs and SUI features the book
finishes by extracting a series of 20 SUI design recommendations that are listed in the
conclusions. Table of Contents: Introduction Searcher-Computer Interaction Early Search
User Interfaces Modern Search User Interfaces Experimental Search User Interfaces
Evaluating Search User Interfaces Conclusions
