One issue that plagues both software and web development is adding in features that sound cool, but confuse the user. What makes perfect sense to the designer often doesn’t make quite as much sense to someone using the software or website for the first time! Let’s talk about a few things that contribute to usable websites. We’ll start with one of the simplest: search.
Placing the Search Box
These days, users expect to see a search box; this is particularly true for ecommerce sites. Don’t make them hunt for it! It should be located near the top of the page, easy to find, and obvious (users should know without thinking about it that this is your search box). This doesn’t just apply to the homepage, either; every page of the site should have the search box, in the same place. Additionally, the default should be to search the entire site, not just the section the user is in; you may opt to provide a checkbox to restrict the search to the current section. As with any rule, there are exceptions; you might, for example, choose to restrict a blog search to the contents of that blog, as we’ve done here.
Handling Search Queries
Users generally expect to see the same results regardless of how they capitalize the query; your search engine should be programmed to ignore case unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, in which case (no pun intended) you can make case-sensitivity a selectable option.
Users often don’t know exactly what term to search for; it is helpful if your search engine understands related terms. For example, a user who searches for “food” might be interested in results for “cooking”, even if the word food never actually appears on the cooking page. One option is to show users a list of related terms that they can search on, and to attempt to correct misspellings. Consider Google: when typing, it offers suggestions for what term you might want, and if you search for what it believes is a misspelled word, it offers the correct spelling.
Design for the Average User
Remember that most users won’t search for long-tail keywords or use boolean queries; they’ll type 2-3 words into the search box and expect to get reasonably relevant results. A good search engine will make it easy for the users to define exactly what they’re searching for, even when the users can’t find (or spell) the correct search terms.
Feel free to provide advanced search options for power users, but don’t let them clutter up the basic search and confuse your new users. As in many things, strive for simplicity; your users will appreciate it.
