Search begins when the user starts looking for an item and it ends when they’ve found what they’re looking for. Designers need to guide users through each step along the way as efficiently and painlessly as possible, taking into account the type of content presented and users’ needs with it.
Power to the user
It's important to help the user feel in control of their searching journey. We, as designers, want them:
1. Initiating the search
The prominence of the search bar should guide users toward the appropriate navigation style for the content.
2. Entering the search input (keywords)
Autocomplete can be a powerful tool for helping users improve their search keywords. but just like initiating a search, there’s more design to autocomplete than meets the eye. Autocomplete suggestions typically come in three types: common keywords, keywords from search history, and scoped searches. A scoped search is when you apply filters (or scopes) in the initial search to limit results to a specific section of the site.
3. Viewing a list of search results
The search results page needs to both show users the results of their search and allow them to easily refine their search as needed. One way to make this easy is to display the search bar with users’ search terms in it at the top of the results page. This not only reminds users of their current search, but it makes it easy to run a new search in a snap.
4. Viewing individual item pages
At this stage, their primary goal is to compare and evaluate. Check out 120 annotated product pages and 51 mobile product pages for some good examples of best practices in action.
SERPs
SERPs (search-engine-results pages) shape how people search. Today, people’s attention is distributed on the page and they process results more nonlinearly than before. Bouncing between various elements across the page defines a new SERP-processing gaze pattern — the pinball pattern.
In a pinball pattern, the user scans a results page in a highly nonlinear path, bouncing around between results and SERP features. Today’s SERPs often involve not only links, but also images, video, embedded text content, and even interactive features. Any given search can return an assortment of different visual elements. The variety of information and presentation plays a critical role in shifting user attention across the SERP.
This gaze plot shows a study participant’s eye gazes as he searched for the best refrigerator to buy. The numbers represent the order of the fixations. The participant’s gaze flicked around between highly salient elements. First, he focused on the prices in the sponsored shopping results on the right, and then skipped down and to the left to read the featured snippet. He then bounced back up to result #3 and #1 (both ads) before glancing down to the People Also Ask element and to result #6 (the first organic result).
1. When search results pages contain complex and visually attractive elements, users are more likely to be drawn to those elements and distribute their attention across the SERP.
2. If you can make it into the top 5 positions on a SERP, you’ll have a good chance (40–80%) of getting a valuable glance from your user.
3. It’s still important to appear within the first page of results, since people still aren’t likely to click through to the second page.
4. Consider adding some of these nontraditional SERP features to your in-site search, if it makes sense for your content. But remember that when results pages are very inconsistent from query to query, users have to re-assess the page each time, which adds to interaction cost.
Crowdsourced information
What's truly surprising is how much information is not created by Google but how Google sources from 3rd party sources. It shows how much of Google's function is to organize information and not to actually create it.
Keyword Foraging
When users don’t know what keywords they need, they must do extra work to determine what their desired item or concept is called. In keyword foraging, a user conducts a preliminary search (usually in a web search engine like Google) to determine the right keywords for her information need. The user:
1. Knows what an item looks like, but doesn’t know its name (e.g., doesn’t know that pointed-toe formal shoes are called “wingtip” shoes)
2. Needs a solution to a problem, but doesn’t know what tool, technique, or service could provide the solution (e.g., needs to replace a piece of trim around the vent at the front of a car, which is called “grille trim”)
3. Used to know what an item was called, but doesn’t remember (e.g., used to know the term “hangar” but forgot it, and must google “plane shed” instead)
4. Knows what an item or concept is called in one language or dialect, but not another (e.g., a British person who doesn’t know that “spring onions” are called “scallions” in American English)
Some large e-commerce sites may find that image search also helps to address this problem. The user doesn’t need to know the name of the thing she wants — just to be able to recognize it and photograph it. However, most site image-search tools aren’t yet able to deliver the quality results that search engines like Google can.
For now, focus on anticipating what language people might use to search for your products or content if they didn’t know the correct term. Check your site search logs, and you might find evidence of these searches occurring on your site. Your customers may search the exact term (“duster”) or a rough description (“long sweater cardigan”). The keyword foraging phenomenon is a reminder to use plain language in your content and also to accept imperfect or inaccurate query formulations.
This problem is also one more reason to avoid inventing new terminology whenever possible, particularly branded terminology. If you invent a new term, your users will definitely not know it.