This project was intense but also one that was one of my most enjoyable since we tried to be as agile as possible. I filled the roles of interaction designer and web developer, so I was responsible for creating some of the wireframes and specifications which we then used in our development.
The GMT's original news results model had to be revised at one point in the project. There were two major problems: Often times the main headline couldn't summarize what the group of related stories was about. It also went against the expected search behavior that all of the search results retrieved should contain at least some of the search terms.
Needless to say, our users were sometimes puzzled with their search results.
As a solution, we made the search pretty straightforward and changed the algorithm to deliver only the news stories that contained terms from a user's query. We also incorporated keywords in the UI to supplement a news group's top headline, as well as two more headlines that are shown when the group is clicked or opened.
These changes were based on a prototype that a fellow developer and I built in Javascript, CSS, and jsp. I also tested users with sample headlines and searches to see which display and data gave them a better understanding of their results.
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