In the blog post here: http://blog.twproject.com/2009/02/20/smarter-search-and-recent-object-functionality I examine a technique to improve usability in complex applications by introducing smarter search and “recent objects” functionalities. As usability becomes more and more a crucial feature of applications, helping users with full-text search and recent object lists may still prove insufficient. You may need to go beyond these features, by having a way to keep track of “most used” objects, which will help to: - guess what you are looking for - find what you are searching for You can in this way also improve full-text searches.

Other uses of collecting hits that I didn’t mention are as a way of collecting statistics of most used functionalities, which can help in improving the usability of your application. You can also detect “paths” in sequences of hits, and that too can be used for improving user experience.

Other uses of collecting hits that I didn’t mention are as a way of collecting statistics of most used functionalities, which can help in improving the usability of your application. You can also detect “paths” in sequences of hits, and that too can be used for improving user experience.

Interesting work - I am working on a similar topic but from another perspective: collecting user errors and preventing the same user to commit the same mistake again by proactively notifying his common mistakes (e.g. forgetting a mandatory field etc.) Perhaps not really interesting for many, but for me it is an unexplored area.

If I'm not mistaken, Mylin's "automated context management" tries to address the same problem. Definitely an interesting topic...