Usability and e-commerce Part 4: Search

Having a powerful search engine within your site might be the best investment of your money.

The most difficult task is to define the technical requirements your search engine needs to fulfil. Once you have decided on those, 3 major points for the design of your search interface are:

1. Place the search clearly visible and offer the search entry field on every page.
2. Make the general search interface as simple as possible. You might want to add an additional filter option such as availability, gender or product category.
3. Don’t go overboard with defining the detailed search. Studies show, that not too many people ever use it.

And what are people looking for in the result page. 5 points

1) Inform the users of what they typed into the search field.
2) How many results were produced
3) The results should have a clear title and a short summary
4) Show where the result is placed within the site (URL)
5) Let the customer filter the results (i.e. from cheapest to most expensive)

e-bay for example lets you filter the search results, shows an image and a title and in addtion even offers the option to save the search criteria.

Check out the entire series:
Part 1) Navigation and homepage
Part 2) Product overview
Part 3) Product detail page
Part 4) Search

To come:
Part 5) Check out process
Part 6) The shopping basket