Scenario for finding a photographer
Blanco, a 29 year old Mexican investment banker living in North Dakota (zipcode: 58102) is getting married to Oprah on July 4, 2011. He's looking for a wedding photographer and the price limit is 10,000$ for the coverage of the whole day. His friends told him about ShutterConnect and he is using the website for the first time. He would like to get a bunch of prints for his extended family in Mexico City. 3 photographers come up:
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After checking out their profiles and sample photos, Blanco decides to go with Emilio.
Design 1 
When Blanco goes to the ShutterConnect site, he sees a prominent search box that accepts natural language queries like "Photographers for birthday party on dec 31 in boston".The only other actions possible on this page are signing in (via box in top right corner), and signing up (bottom of the page). Since this is Blanco's first time, he just types his query as "Wedding on July 4 in North Dakota" and clicks on the "find photographers" button. He is then presented with a list of photographers who match his query: 
The top of the page contains a search box so that he can create a new search if necessary. Below it, in the "information area" we list the number of results found for his query along with filtering options like budget; we also use the information area to display what we parsed from the user's natural language query. Below this information box is a list of profiles of photographers. A profile contains photographer's photo, short bio, ratings and some sample pictures. We also have an "x" button next to each photographer so that the user can remove that particular person from his list of search results. Clicking on the short profile takes the Blanco to the photographer's profile page containing more details, reviews and sample pictures.
A user can also use the "Save Search" feature to save this query to revisit it later; this is because we know from user study that they like to take time to pick photographers for their special occasions.
Analysis of Design 1 for this scenario
- Learnability
- Simple homepage, with few elements
- Looks like Google page (consistency with popular interfaces)
- Visibility
- Having search parameters at the top of the results page makes it clear what was searched for.
- Efficiency
- Search bar at the top of results page makes it efficient to start over
- Typing whatever you want and letting the system parse makes searching efficient
- Reviews can be filtered to show ones that are most similar to your case
- Error Prevention/Correction
- Modifying search criteria is easy
- Coding up the natural language processing will be difficult.
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