Ecommerce User Experience Vol. 05: Search

You can’t sell a product that your customers can’t find. Your site must accommodate all types of searches and return relevant results for categories, products, and product characteristics. Search is a critical element of building a profitable website. In our recent e-commerce usability study, 85% of users searched on one or more sites.

This 222-page report contains 80 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 216 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Even though some of the design guidelines are specific to searching for products, many of the guidelines apply to all forms of web searches, including general websites and intranets.

Topics

• Using search to meet customer needs
  • Giving users a feeling for breadth or depth of the site's product selection
  • Allowing users to quickly locate a product category or something specific
  • Providing a fallback option to site navigation
  • Enabling users to narrow their options
  • Supporting users’ ability to return to an item previously located
• Customer queries
  • Search queries, what people type
  • Query length
  • Within site searches versus web-wide searches
• Best practices for search on ecommerce websites
  • Placement and presentation of search
  • Accommodating different lengths and types of searches
  • Interpreting and supporting the query
  • Returning useful results
  • Presenting search results
  • Sorting results
  • Narrowing product choices using faceted search (filters)
  • Providing advanced and scoped searches
  • Rich search suggestions
  • Guided navigation versus faceted search

Research Method

The information in these reports is based on two separate rounds of ecommerce studies, including:

• One-on-one usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal study
• Eyetracking

Representative users tested 255 ecommerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and China (Hong Kong).