Search is almost a universal experience on the web. Every day consumer search engines are used to navigate, investigate and complete transactions. The activity has become its own verb. These daily interactions establish user behavior patterns setting expectations, criteria for success and expectations of how search should work. A recent PewResearch study reports 73% of all Americans use search with a self defined 91% success rate. This sets the bar for an enterprise search system pretty high and makes the search experience easy to mess up.
1. Understand Complexity of User Experience – Plan Appropriately
A two-person team can complete a Proof of Concepts in a snap. Standing up search in a production environment indexing diverse content silos with document-level security, while returning sub-second results is challenging; every time. Grasping the complexity of both the problem and the solution is essential. Understanding complexity of search and planning appropriately will help you avoid the most common pitfall to enterprise search… under-resourcing the solution.
2. A Path to Improving Search – Patterns to the rescue
With proper resources in place, it is important to remember that implementing search can be complicated enough without having to reinvent the wheel. Thousands of development hours have laid a path for you to follow. These design patterns (or paradigms if you’d like) can greatly streamline and improve your design and development process. Use them, where appropriate, to your advantage.
Use patterns to you advantage
Intercept Failures with silent Query Expansion or spelling correction
Catching user error whenever possible can greatly increase use experience and reduce failed searches.
Guide the user through auto complete
Matching users to previously successful searches increases search success as well as reducing failed searches.
Don’t bother with advanced search. It is so 2011 (Only 1% of Users actually use Advanced Search) – prioritize appropriately.
Advanced search is often not worth additional development effort. The ROI is extremely low. Google has dropped the option all together.
3. Simplify the Interface – Less is more
Repeat after me….Search is a transaction. Users are using search to perform an action. While a shockingly bad interface can interrupt the experience focus your design of the interface to get them through transaction quickly. Minimize visual clutter that is not assisting the user with their goal (metadata filters are a possible exception). Search results should pervade the search result page, not fancy menus and advertising. Utilize the Golden Triangle as a guidance for how search results can be effective.
4. Avoid over Configuration – Trust the user
The heart of any search system is the algorithm. Trust it. Poor search relevancy is more often than not the fault of the content source more than the algorithm. A thorough review of content silos in preparation of acquisition and indexing should help identify content that is not rich enough for successful indexing. Avoid the temptation to tweak or assume anything about what the user is searching by pre-filtering. This leads down the path to endless cycles of seesaw tuning and ultimately the perception of an unstable system. I refer to this end state as whack a mole configuration.
5. Collect and Use Date for Enhancements
Analytics are great. Insight to user behavior is important to understanding navigation bottleneck and ineffective design. Search has an added bonus… users are telling exactly what they are looking for. Use this to iteratively improve the user’s search experience.
Use Analytics to:
- Capture search failure
- Capture common spelling mistakes
- Identify Jargon to possibly provide query expansion
- Identify potential indexing issues.
“Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.”
– Dalai Lama
The paths laid out above are not hard fast rules, they are more of guideposts. Search provides access to information that people (should) need to use. These simple observation may help you improve your search, which can only be a good thing right?