One of the design challenges we had in Delver was one of delicate balancing. On the one hand, our service is a search engine that delivers results based on exact identity of the user. On the other hand, we wanted to give users the full experience without having to register to the service. The reason for this is mainly because users expect their internet search engine to “just work”, without registration (even though today, most people are logged in to Yahoo or Google anyway).

As a startup, registered users are very important to us (registered users are the currency of the web 2.0 economy), but we were willing to give up maximizing that particular metric, in order to provide the smoothest user experience.

The solution we found was a “temporary user” entity. This solution allows the user that arrives at www.delver.com to “tell us who they are” by finding themselves in the Delver people database that we have created by crawling the internet.

The downside of this solution is that users created in this manner do not have a username or password. This means that when their web cookie is gone or they switch computers - we no longer know who they are and the process has to be re-done. To overcome this, we show a suggestion tip to the user, recommending that they register. By this time the user is familiar with our service and can better decide whether registering is something they’re interested in. Also, the registration at this point is quicker as we have already collected most of the data we need.

So, what’s the best way to let the user identify themselves? The design goal was that the user should be able to start using the search engine in 30 seconds or less from the time they landed on our homepage.

In an early prototype we asked the user to enter any piece of information about themselves:

After playing around with this version, we decided that this was confusing to the user and it was hard for us to show the best matching people, because of the possible ambiguity (for example: “George Washington” can mean a person who’s last name is “Washington” or a George that lives in Washington). We wanted the user to enter as little information as possible in order to start using Delver as quickly as possible.

We decided that it’s most natural for users to type in their name or email, so we changed the behavior to:

Now we had to deal with two situations:
1. Your name brings up too many people
2. We can’t find your name

For the first case, we offer narrowing the results by using other criteria:

Now the user only needs to enter additional information if their name is too common.

For the second case, we added the “social circles” step:

Using the “social circles” feature, we can build your search network not only using connections we’ve found on the internet (social networks, photo sharing sites etc.), but also using information on your workplace, location and so on. For example: two people working at “ACME chemicals” will be connected in Delver.

In short, the currently implemented user identification process answers our goals of:
1. Being quick
2. Not requiring the user to register
3. Identifying the user in a way that allows us to provide custom search results based on the user’s social network

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on the result.