Presenting different types of information in an integrated way

Access to relevant information is helpful for people affected by cancer. Research shows that it increases their quality of life: it gives them more control over their situation, enables them to make well-considered choices and improves collaboration with practitioners. The web naturally meets this need for (instant) access but it does have a drawback: reliability. People can say anything, but is it true?

Kanker.nl is the reliable guide to the world of cancer. It offers validated information, care and support and experiential knowledge that meets their house rule: it must be about oneself and cannot promise a cure. From the start, it has balanced these different types of information as best as possible, in the belief that this creates synergy. For example, if people come looking for information about a certain treatment, they can also find information about where they can undergo it and how other people have experienced it and vice versa.

The users of kanker.nl value the quality of the information on the site, but the diversity caused them problems in finding the right information.

'We do a lot of user research and our search results consistently came up as something our users found unclear. We offer a lot of disparate information: many differently shaped trees so they can no longer see the forest.'

The kanker.nl information mix consists of validated information on all types of cancer, its treatments and side effects, information on where to find additional care, support and expertise and experiential knowledge in the form of fora, blogs and fellow sufferers. The challenge is to present the most relevant results to users without knowing with certainty what type of information they are searching for:

'Right before our project with Spinque, we had just done a major project to improve search, but that did not have the desired results. The hope had been to get a higher rating from users, but that wasn't the case.'

A colleague told Susan about a company specializing in search, Spinque. She reached out and liked what she learned: the architecture of Spinque Desk, our use of Knowledge Graphs and our design approach. She decided to investigate in a design sprint whether we could help them improve search and was very pleased with the result:

'It was valuable that outsiders interviewed our users and also asked us critical questions. And because we worked with actual data, it did not remain a theoretical exercise. In only 5 days we built a real user-centric search engine that balances user's own experiences with validated info, shows related info and makes recommendations. And on top of that we gained insight on how we could improve our search even further.'

An important improvement we made to the search result page is to present the different types of results in an integrated way. Primarily, articles with validated information can be found. Other types of results are clustered together and the cluster as a whole is shown when relevant. For example, when a user is looking for subjective experiences of others, a top result will be a cluster containing a handful of blog posts and forum topics. Similar to how you'll sometimes encounter a row of images in the 'All' tab on Google. There is a rich variety of information on kanker.nl and the clusters make one aware of this. This also encourages further exploration of this type of information by continuing your search in the designated tab. Here only results of the relevant type are shown as not to distract users while they are looking for an answer to their specific search query.

To rank the results we use various relevance criteria. The information that best matches these criteria are shown as the top results. An interesting one that came out of our sessions is popularity. Whether a piece of information is popular among other users of kanker.nl tells us something about its usefulness. We used the page view statistics that kanker.nl already collected as a measure of popularity and integrated them into the search strategy. Another valuable source of information we used in this strategy was the extensive thesaurus kanker.nl already had in place with synonyms and related concepts.

'I really like this way of presenting the different types of results and supporting users in their search. Spinque Desk makes it possible to handle our information in this intuitive way!'

Not only Susan liked the way the search results were presented but so did the users and the most important stakeholders. Kanker.nl thus decided to implement the newly developed search functionality and it has been used to great satisfaction ever since.

Search was the beginning of the collaboration between kanker.nl and Spinque. It gave rise to many ideas for better personalization and recommendation on the site. With the knowledge graph in place and Spinque Desk as the design tool for data access, there was no more hurdle to start experimenting and bring these ideas to life.

Spinque thus puts Susan and her team not only in charge of their search, but also of personalization and recommendation!