Finders Keepers: Effective Search Design

Tom Chi

Do you need search?

• Crutch or core flow? What’s its influence on awareness, sign-up, lead gen, & conversion?

SEO

Social

Direct/App

Content (or aggregator)

Ads/Direct

Search

SEO/SEM

Social

Partners

Goods(or aggregator)

Direct/Rev-Share/Ads

Search

Service/Utility Subs

Search

Consumer Orgs Ads

Marketplace Fees

Search

Buyers Sellers Ads

Using Search Beyond Search• Search infrastructure can scalably power browsing &

task flows

• Search behavior provides insights to customers expectations & opportunities

Effective Search Technology

• Fast - technology and design

• Relevant - rank what matters

• Comprehensive - cover enough ground

• Fresh - updates to meet expectations

searchquery

search box results page

Search Logs - Query Analysis

• Part of Speech Analysis

buy rainbow unicorns search

Nouns for strong indexing

Adjectives for refiners

Verbs for item actions

Informing Backend Structure

buy rainbow unicorns search

Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…

Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…

Buy now!

Buy now!

color: rainbow | white | gold | mottled | sparkle refiners

keywordsactions

Effective Search Design

buy rainbow unicorns search

Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…

Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…

Buy now!

Buy now!

color: rainbow | white | gold | mottled | sparkle

ping Rainbow Unicorn - $54 corn fans, get ready to rock! With a fier bow mane, and a spike of pure gold, le leaping unicorn…

: rainbow | white | gold | mottled

ow unicorns

in Rainbow Meadow Butterflies, Bunnies, and

ow Unic ready to r

Scannability, not Readability

• Searchers often read just 5-8 words per search, scan 30-50. Spend < 10 sec

• Bolding for Information Scent

• Visual Guideposts for Cognitive Savings

Context keyword context context, and more text that provides further context until the next keyword revealing even more.

In Theory…

In Practice…

While BrowsingWhile Searching

“Cognitive Budget” being Expended

Visual Rhythm for Multimedia

• Make media comparable - image normalization, quality

• Don’t disrupt text scanning flow• Create self-coherent info groupings that

can be absorbed in a glance

Graphical clustering, but text is scattered and too difficult to scan.

Good pacing, several ways / attributes to scan results. Uniform relevance vector.

Assistance, Spelling, Refiners• Searching is still difficult for many

• Assistance can speed up search task

• Relevance still matters, useless refiners can take people in the wrong direction

query search

query assistancequery term2querytastic term3

Did you mean: spell correction?

refiners

Additional Design Pointers• Multiple boxes - typically confusing

• Federated results - creates multiple #1s

• Zero Results Pages - recovery chance

query search

x xOption 1 Option 2

select query search

Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…

Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…

$36 $18

$13$149

Q&A

• Email: thegoodtomchi@yahoo.com

• Web: tomchi.com