Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

Subscribe to our podcast via

A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2. In this article, Daniel explores specific aspects of faceted search interfaces that raise front-end usability concerns such as the search box and dealing with multiple selection. He then looks at a more holistic approach through design patterns.

If you’re in the process of implementing faceted search within your web site, or thinking about doing so, you’ll want to watch the upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar with Daniel Tunkelang and Pete Bell on faceted search. You’ll get some real insights into the challenges and tricks when implementing faceted search. And, as a bonus, you’ll get a free copy of Daniel’s book Faceted Search when you register. Read all about the virtual seminar and see a preview. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences below.