In a previous post I said that Search User Interfaces (UI) have two jobs -- helping people find things and educating them about the catalog's structure. (I'll use "catalog" here under the assumption that I'm describing an e-commerce search system, but much of this post is relevant for other search domains.) …

One of my specialties as a freelance consultant is discovery systems for e-commerce -- web pages and backend systems for helping users search for and find what they want or need. For the last year and a half, I've been working as a consultant for DesignShop, a company that sells materials samples for home renovations. …