Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.
When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.
People usually recognize that a magnifying-glass icon indicates a search tool, even when it has no label. Unfortunately, showing only the icon makes search more difficult to find.
When users get 0 search results, there’s a high risk of site abandonment. Better design can turn this UX disaster into an opportunity for content discovery.
Searching for colleagues is the most common task that employees do on intranets, and is arguably the most important task. Forms, news, and apps aid employee productivity, but you can't beat talking with the right people. Today's design patterns for intranet employee search make the act of finding people outrageously fast and easy.
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.
Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take 6 other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.
The website is becoming a less prominent locus of experience as people use search engines to bring up answers to their current questions. How can sites cope with masses of freeloaders?
Server logs from www.useit.ocm shows sharply increasing traffic from Google in 2001. Referrer statistics may be a leading indicator for portal success.
The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.
Guidelines conflict on whether to limit intranet search to a single search box or dedicate an additional box to employee directory searches. There's theory to support both guidelines. What's up?
Search is the user's lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the homepage and play down advanced search and scoping.
Search is the primary interface to the Web for many users. Search should be global (not scoped to a subsite) and available from every page; booleans should be made intimidating since users usually use them wrong
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.
Today, a SERP (search engine results page) contains so many design elements that users don't have a simple way of picking out their preferred link. Eyetracking studies show that users' eyes bounce around the page between items in a scan pattern that resembles a pinball machine game.
Is it enough to have a search feature on a website? Or do users also benefit from a well-designed navigation interface? Depending on the nature of the site, the balance between the two can change.
Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. (This is about how to design the search feature on your own website, whether it's an ecommerce site or not.)
Eyetracking studies show that users sometimes look at only a single result on a search-results page because that result is good enough for their needs.
Search-engine design alters users’ gaze patterns on search-engine results pages, but only when users find the information on the page relevant to their current task.
Now that people can easily find answers to their questions directly on results pages, content creators must rethink their role in providing information to their users.
We organize online information-seeking activities that lead to important decisions and actions according to 5 dimensions: purpose, method, content, social interaction, and device used to carry out the activity.
Because today’s search-results pages have many possible complex layouts, users don’t always process search results sequentially. They distribute their attention more variably across the page than in the past.
Ecommerce search tools are easy to find, return more-relevant results than in the past, and rely on autosuggestions and facets to guide users through the search space.
Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. If appropriate, they include scope, thumbnails, or categories.
A large-scale usability study revealed the most common and damaging web-design mistakes of today. They aren't surprising or new - they're enduring issues that continue to hurt website usability.
Displaying faceted-search controls on mobile devices in a ‘tray’ overlay is a new effective solution to the challenge of showing both results and filters on small screens.
Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.
When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.
People usually recognize that a magnifying-glass icon indicates a search tool, even when it has no label. Unfortunately, showing only the icon makes search more difficult to find.
When users get 0 search results, there’s a high risk of site abandonment. Better design can turn this UX disaster into an opportunity for content discovery.
Searching for colleagues is the most common task that employees do on intranets, and is arguably the most important task. Forms, news, and apps aid employee productivity, but you can't beat talking with the right people. Today's design patterns for intranet employee search make the act of finding people outrageously fast and easy.
