Satisfying The Need for Search Without Adding It
June 21st, 2006
This morning, after my keynote presentation at the Endeca Discover 2006 conference, my friend, Pete Bell, co-founder of Endeca, told me about their recent redesign of the Endeca home page.
On the old page, Pete said, people would regularly ask them about the site’s search. People, coming to the site, would become frustrated with the page because it wasn’t clear how to find Search.
Click to see the Old Endeca home page, circa 2005.
This year, Endeca redesigned the page. Endeca’s Chief Strategist, Paul Sonderegger, who was formerly Forrester Research’s expert in user experience methods, convinced Pete and the design team to use those methods Paul found worked the best. They conducted field research and interviews, created personas, and designed the page iteratively.
As a result, the new page happens to have more links on it. (Not a complete surprise to us. Sites developed with a lot of user research regularly end up with more links.)
Click to see the Current Endeca home page.
Pete said that nobody asks for Search any more. It seems users were only looking for Search because there wasn’t enough Scent on the home page. The additional links are now adding the necessary scent, thereby negating the need for Search.
Pretty ironic for a company that sells a Search solution. (And a pretty nifty one at that — definitely check it out!)
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June 26th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Jared,
Interesting post. The site definitely looks like a more ‘traditional’ website now than the old one (although its not as visually memorable!).
I find it interesting that there is no Search link or quick search textbox on the home page. Not needing search because you can navigate through available links is one thing. Hiding search completely when that is all you do as a vendor seems to be very strange to me! Let’s hope it works for them.
Phil