Accurate search engines and other up-to-the-minute content aggregators are drastically changing the game of web design. It's turning into a situation where the information architecture that is most important isn't the one that's on your web site, but the one on everyone else's.
Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to be the same reason why Search won't work well on your site. This article discusses how Amazon can take advantage of having "uniquely identified content", an advantage most sites don't have.
When we watched 30 users trying to search various sites for content they were interested in, we noticed a peculiar phenomenon: The more times the users searched, the less likely they were to find what they wanted.
In a 2001 research study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search (less than with categories). We wanted to know why.
Web designers often tell us that they spend a great deal of their time and resources working to improve their on-site search engines because, they believe, there are some people who always rely on the search engine to reach their target content. Here's what we found.
Back in 1997, we watched users look for information on web sites. Users went to these search engines in almost half the tasks. As you'll read in this article, maybe they shouldn't have.
©1997-2009, User Interface Engineering.
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
800-588-9855 (within U.S. and Canada) or 978 327-5561
Questions or Comments? Talk to Us.