Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 36

Most folks know of eBay as a great place to go and find something to purchase at a good price, but it also has an agentive feature called Followed Searches. Launched back in 1999 as the Personal Shopper, this feature lets users take any search and keep it going. Even if I don’t find one right now in a style, size, and price I want, I can ask the site to keep an eye on all new items that go on sale there for me, and let me know when any match.

eBay has search tools for that moment I hope to find something for now, and agentive tools to help me keep track of things I’m interested in.

What’s interesting for the kind of search embodied in these three agentive examples is that creating too specific of a search term can work against you. Following a search for “green Ted Baker shirts selling for $53 in San Francisco” might find you exactly the shirt you’re looking for right now, but it would not provide a fruitful persistent search in the future. Users need to be able to set up more abstract searches, and agents may need to help them do it.

These kinds of persistent searches move you from having to go out and find stuff of interest yourself to letting stuff of interest find you—for example, to subscribe to your favorite artists (or authors) or to notify you when cool things are mentioned online. The dark side of this might be opt-out advertising, but in the best cases, these agents turn the tables so that your interests find you. How will marketing and advertising change when this becomes the norm?