UIEtips article: Producing Great Search Results — Harder than It Looks, Part 2
July 14th, 2008
As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. There’s really no way without studying the users’ goals and needs, and watching how they interact with the results the engine generates. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end goal, but one tool they can choose to help achieve their objective. Without a deep understanding of their objectives, it’s really difficult to design a great tool for them.
In today’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, I conclude my feature discussion on producing great search results pages. In the article, I share some of the behavior patterns we’ve uncovered as we researched how people interact with the results from a search query, including how they deal with link relevancy and the chunking of results.
This week’s conclusion produces several more surprising results from our research. I’m betting there will be some good discussion that follows.
Read my article, Producing Great Search Results: Harder Than It Looks, Part 2.
As I was writing this week’s article, I kept thinking about all the different skills that come into play when you try to design an effective search results page. Even though it’s just designing a single page, it requires a team with talents and experience in information architecture, user research, visual design, interaction design, analytics, and copywriting.
It’s no coincidence that we’ve assembled world-renowned experts on these topics at our upcoming User Interface 13 Conference, scheduled for October 13-16, 2008 in Cambridge, MA. Make sure to check out the full program at the User Interface 13 Conference.
When you’re watching your users interact with your site’s search result pages, what behaviors have you noticed? We’d love to hear your insights. Share your thoughts with us below.
July 14th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hi Jared, I’m appreciating your articles about search results. A thought came up for me with respect to the pogosticking idea. In general I agree that finding the right amount of data in the search result is generally a good idea. But reading the reasoning that sales decreased with increased pogostick behavior, made me immediately think of another possible cause for that correlation or at least influence.
In your testing was the familiarity of the customer with the listed products somehow factored? It seems like customers very familiar with the products already, akin to “knowing what they want already” would look at the search results and be ready to make a purchase. But customers who were not as familiar might still be in a browsing state of mind and be more interested in product details and educating themselves. Therefore, the pogostick behavior might convey more what state of mind the customer is in, rather than attributing the behavior solely to distracting or tiring the user.
Perhaps you already accounted for that influence in the tests, your newsletter only summarizes the results. But that’s what struck me when I first read it. Perhaps others in their testing of search results can account for that as well.
Best to you,
-Davee Evans
July 15th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Good reading
Hi UIE … Have teams you worked with provided insights as to the ways they try to better understand the data associated with a search result to better inform a customer decision? For example, what data would you need to display on a hotel room, car, mobile phone (to name a few) to get someone to buy? What do designers and researchers need to do to better understand what to display on a search result?
This seems like a critical part of any search results — displaying the precise product/service information in addition to pricing to inform a buy/no buy decision.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:23 am
[...] design patterns that have made your site more effective? Please tell us your thoughts on our Brain Sparks blog. Published Jul 15 2008, 11:17 AM by electric Filed under: Usability, [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
thanks for a great article. I hadn’t seen findings about number of search results like that before. Seems like the only reason left to use a per page limit is response times.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:42 am
This is an absolutely terrific article. I have been working on a car review search engine (fasttie.com) for a while now and the article addresses all of the concerns that I have been running into. A problem I have found is that you start losing the forest for the trees when you have been working on it too long. At times it becomes hard to get the mindset back of a new user.
August 21st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Hi Jared,
I’ve noticed sites like clusty.com and powerset.com allow the user to view the documents in-line without having to leave the gallery / search results page.
Are these inline document viewing widgets effective mechanisms for helping users mitigate pogosticking pain?
Thanks!
Pete