Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. (This is about how to design the search feature on your own website, whether it's an ecommerce site or not.)
Ecommerce search tools are easy to find, return more-relevant results than in the past, and rely on autosuggestions and facets to guide users through the search space.
Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. If appropriate, they include scope, thumbnails, or categories.
A large-scale usability study revealed the most common and damaging web-design mistakes of today. They aren't surprising or new - they're enduring issues that continue to hurt website usability.
Displaying faceted-search controls on mobile devices in a ‘tray’ overlay is a new effective solution to the challenge of showing both results and filters on small screens.
Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.
When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.
People usually recognize that a magnifying-glass icon indicates a search tool, even when it has no label. Unfortunately, showing only the icon makes search more difficult to find.
When users get 0 search results, there’s a high risk of site abandonment. Better design can turn this UX disaster into an opportunity for content discovery.
Searching for colleagues is the most common task that employees do on intranets, and is arguably the most important task. Forms, news, and apps aid employee productivity, but you can't beat talking with the right people. Today's design patterns for intranet employee search make the act of finding people outrageously fast and easy.
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.
