Search Patterns

Chapter 3. Behavior

"If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

—Louis Armstrong

In music, improvisation is the art of creating a song while performing it, in the moment and in response to interplay and interaction. Along with blue notes, polyrhythms, and syncopation, improv is fundamental to the nature of jazz. The freedom and spontaneity of the solo passes from saxophone to piano to trumpet in the call-and-response pattern of African-American field hollers, while the drums and double bass weave a musical fabric in conversational rhythm. Good jazz engages the listener. It’s hard to resist the spellbinding power of a player with chops who’s in the pocket. We become fully immersed in a state of flow that dissolves the lines between act and actor. As the artist Henri Matisse once noted, “There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.”

In designing the interaction of search, we’d do well to keep jazz in mind, because behavior is a conversation and flow is a state worth striving for. When we search, our actions are reactions to the stimuli of information and interface. The box and its controls shape how we search, and what we find changes what we seek. The distinction between user and system dissolves in behavior. It’s an activity that’s open to flow. At its best, search absorbs our attention totally. Our experience of time and self are altered. We become lost in the most positive of senses. But we don’t ...