Improving Search Usability

— Published May 31st, 2005  |  by John Wood   |  1 Comments

Search Controls

The way site visitors use search features can be summarised as follows:

• Scan the area along the top of the main content section of the page looking for a text input box
• If this looks like the search control, enter keywords
• Hit the return key or click the nearest button

People want to get searching right away and get good results quickly. They won't often stop to read instructions or labels or to figure out any extra control options on offer.

As a result, simpler is better. Place the search box on the top right of the page below the banner. Don't put text input boxes for other functions in this or adjacent areas. Label the button "Search" and don't bother with a redundant label.

Options to filter or otherwise control the search have no place here - they are rarely used and are a potential usability catastrophe. Search the whole site by default, and offer a text link to an Advanced search for the small group of people looking for this.

Search Returns

Here, users are looking to evaluate a return as quickly as possible and decide if it is worth following or not.

Ranking returns according to relevance is vital. People won't go more than two or three pages in before deciding they need to reformulate their query, so the top 20 or 30 results are vital.

The total number of returns is useful in providing the user with a clue as to how specific or broad their search term was.

Search return pages should have navigation very similar to Google, including information on the query searched for, advice on possible spelling mistakes and a search box to perform another query quickly.

It's imperative to provide a sufficiently descriptive title and page extract to ensure that the user understands what lies at the other end of the link. (This is examined in more detail in the metadata section.)

Present returns in batches across several pages and facilitate easy navigation between batches (ten returns per page seems to be emerging as the convention).

Allow users to understand and recover from zero match returns: If the query returns no matches, or a user submits a search with no search terms, explain the problem clearly and suggest actions to rectify it.

Metadata

Search engine optimization hacks have all but rendered the meta keywords tag useless for Internet search engines (currently, only the Inktomi search engine uses it). If your own search engine makes use of these keywords, however, they may be worth including.

On the other hand, the meta description tag is vital as it often appears in search engine returns listings. It needs to be a unique and human-readable summary of the page content.

A unique, human-readable page title that makes good use of keywords is also important. Best of all, though, is well written page content that makes good use of keywords that reflect those used in the page title.

The Google effect

From all this, you might well arrive at the conclusion that search engines should work like Google does, and you'd be right. As Nielsen has pointed out in a recent Alertbox article on search, Google and other successful searches all work alike and have formed users' mental models of how search should work.

Following their example (and these guidelines) should save you effort and help your users.

John Wood and David Moore