Todd Vaccaro

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Portfolio

SEARCH

On September 5, 2013 - Portfolio

Search

KnowledgeBlocks – ScienceDirect, Book Recommendations – to come
Deduplication of Scientific Papers – FAST, SciVerse Hub/ScienceDirect
Database Search – Lucene, SAM

Recommender Systems

ScienceDirect Recommender System

When a feature comes together well, it’s as close to magic as a Product Manager is capable of. Furthermore, the best part working on and creating innovative search products is hearing positive user feedback. I worked collaboratively with others at Elsevier, HPCC and EPFL to bring a recommendation system to scientists on ScienceDirect.com, and we were all very excited when one of our users tweeted their joy about our recommender engine.

And the discussion didn’t end there.

When that happens, I get a little giddy.

Book Club Hero

Search User Interface

AutoComplete/AutoSuggest
Citation Analysis
SAM reports

Natural Language Processing

Coursera

USABILITY

On June 3, 2013 - Portfolio

Usability is about understanding how, when, and where to improve the site. But on a slightly deeper level it is understanding how easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks, how quickly can they do those tasks, what errors happen for a user and how satisfing the site feels for the users?

I have done quite a lot of usability as a Product Manager. I even founded the Usability Group at McGraw-Hill. I once contracted with Baruch College’s The Computer Center for Visually Impaired People (CCVIP) I have completed all the courses offered by Human Factors. But primarily I enjoy usability testing because it gets me closer to understanding the user and allows me to discuss the options available to managment with Data instead of theories. Towards that end, there are some techniques that I would like to show and explain why I use them.

When it comes to assessing and creating the labels and priority order of any navigation, my go-to activity is card sorting. Here is an example of me conducting a card sorting test.