Images are all around us. In newspapers, online, on billboards, and innumerable other places, someone has made the purposeful, and often expensive, decision to create a specific image experience. It is the job of image professionals to create a mood, style, and statement with visual materials, and to effectively accomplish this he/she must be able to find images for both inspiration and to satisfy discrete image-needs.
There are an ever-increasing number of sites dedicated to delivering images to these professionals, but very little has been written on how these users actually search for images. Improved search algorithms and more intuitive user interfaces only go so far in improving the user experience, yet these have been the primary topics of studies related to image searching systems.
Our study hopes to further understanding of how image-searching systems are used in real-world settings. Our group, in conjuction with Getty Images, has designed an approach that will hopefully be able to shed some light on the problems involved in graphic-design related image-searching in the hope of creating systems that meet designers’ needs. We propose using elements of Beyer and Holtzblatt’s Contextual Design along with data from surveys to gain an understanding of what steps are involved in image-searching and what features could improve the searching process.
