Читать книгу Search Analytics for Your Site - Louis Rosenfeld - Страница 19

So John pulled the chain to halt the process from going forward. With his project manager’s support, John described the problem to the IT staff who owned the project. They nodded their heads and listened patiently. And then they told John that they couldn’t see the problem. After all, the search engine was up and running, and had been set up as the vendor suggested. The vendor was experienced and clearly knew what it was doing, likely far more than anyone at Vanguard (John included) could possibly know about how a search engine should work. Anecdotal findings from one person’s poor search experience weren’t going to trump that knowledge. With the launch date just around the corner, the staff weren’t about to halt the project.

Now, this may seem to be an unreasonable response. But most IT people would react in the same way, and with good reasons: technically, the search engine really was working quite well. And while Vanguard’s IT staff were uncommonly sensitive to user experience issues, it wasn’t clear that the problem John was intuiting actually existed. After all, he had no compelling proof to present that the search was broken. Combine these reasons with the pressures IT faced to get the project completed on schedule, and you could argue that the IT people were actually being very reasonable.

But as an information architect, John was concerned about the user experience of search. That’s why he’d been brought in to the search engine selection process in the first place—to make sure that the search engine actually served the end user, rather than just conforming to a set of technical requirements. But the new search engine already seemed too likely to fail miserably. John could already envision the hate mail coming in from users who were demanding that the old search engine be reinstated. And he could already hear the words from managers’ mouths: “What the hell happened here?” John had raised a red flag, but he failed to make a convincing argument.

So John wasn’t satisfied. He’d tried to put the brakes on the search engine’s launch to avert a disaster and had failed.