October 1, 2008

Robin Jeffries, Google

How do we understand how people use Google search?

Abstract

While using a search engine seems intuitively obvious to most of us, we find that people use Google search in strange and mysterious ways. This talk will cover a series of explorations, using methods from field studies to logs analysis to eyetracking, that helped us understand how Google searchers behave and what an "expert searcher" looks like.

Robin Jeffries is a User Research Analyst for Google Ads, where she has worked to understand how Google users interact with search result pages (including the ads). Her career has spanned academic positions (CMU and U of Colorado), industrial research (Hewlett Packard), and product development (Sun Microsystems and Google). She has a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado. She's been active in the HCI field, including Technical Program Chair of CHI 2006 and currently Action Editor for ToCHI and Editorial Advisory Board for <interactions>. In her spare time, she moonlights as Her Systers' Keeper, catherder for a group of 3000 technical women.

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