I recently attended a symposium where the objective was to explore the use of typical Human Computer Interaction evaluation methods for the assessment of creative work. Basically, they wanted to understand how best to evaluate art and design from the viewers’ perspective. I thought it was interesting how the disciplines of art and design were grouped together, with the latter, in my opinion, only requiring any serious consideration for evaluation.
Art is simply evaluated by the beholder (and I suppose the critic as well). Either it is liked and appreciated, or it is not. The artist is usually using some medium to express their views or interpretation of many things including an image, event, or emotion. The user, viewer, or the person who experiences the art does not have (in most cases) the opportunity to provide feedback that would affect the result.
Design, has a greater responsibility. Unlike art, it usually has a purpose beyond expression and is used in some way (there is an identifiable receiver or user), and therefore can be evaluated based on that premise. Design also has a whole host of challenges that art does not have. Firstly, designers usually have to work to a brief or framework that can limit their creativity. These could be constraints as a result of the target audience, size of a product, limitations in technology or user interface structure. They also will, more than likely, have to work collaboratively with a team made up of people from a variety of disciplines, all with a contribution to the final outcome.
As a result of this, they will have to adjust their designs based on stakeholder requirements and user evaluations, and still produce something creative within what may be very constrained boundaries. Alternatively, the artist, although partial to public praise, needs only to please themselves.
The artist would lose much by having to submit to an iterative process of third party evaluation and re-design - Essentially this type of evaluation needs to come from within. The artist looks inward and creates, where as the designer must look outward and create - Potentially a much more difficult task.
It was then that I found that, although there were often 60+ products for me to view, there was no sort function on the product results – I couldn’t view the products in order of price, colour or anything else, I was stuck with the random order that I was given. It was then that I decided that it wasn’t worth spending the time going through all the results and left the websites.
Bing uses powerful imagery that’s eye catching although whether that’s a good or bad thing for search remains to be seen. Google’s always gone down the minimalist route when it comes to visual design. Interestingly, Bing’s background images seem to change almost daily, so a bit more frequently than the 
Bing’s ‘More’ search options button takes the user to a page that bizarrely shows just 1 additional item. They’d do well to include this extra ‘xRank’ option on the actual search page itself - 1 more link isn’t going to overwhelm users. Google handles additional search options well, with a ‘More’ drop down that lets the user see exactly what else there is, right there on the page. It’s only past ‘Even more’ that Google takes users to a different page entirely.
The feather in Bing’s cap is its preview feature on the search results page. This is a nifty little feature as it saves users to-ing and fro-ing between the search results page and the websites. Till now, the only way to explore the results in a bit more detail was to leave the search engine and go to the actual pages. An area that this preview’s great for is online comparison shopping. Imagine quickly being able to see the differences right there on the page and making a decision. The downside is that its design’s quite subtle with a vertical bar that’s easily missed if one doesn’t hover to the right of the results. It’s more likely to be an accidental discovery than an intuitive one. So while it’s ingenious, its visibility can certainly be improved upon.