Media Author Search
As a member of the Dow Jones UX team, my work involved design solutions that allowed users to navigate massive amounts of data in complex structures. In this case, we needed a search interface that allowed users to find media authors that may or may not have been a part of a predefined list that the user had created.
In the end, I designed a clickable prototype in Keynote and conducted informal research to validate the usability.
The Author Summary module would show an overview contact and activity information about a specified author that the user wanted to follow. But first, the user needs to search and find what contact she would like to be displayed. She can do so in either of two ways, through a free-text search (left) or by selecting a contact list (right).
This shows the auto-complete dropdown that is displayed as the user enters text into the search field. (The authors shown in this menu are drawn only from the user's contacts within the system)
At any time the user can scroll through the list and click on an author's name to select it.
The selected author is recognized and displayed in "pill" form within the search field. The user can click "Go" to select that author for the module or the "X" button to remove it and pick up the search where she left off.