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Search usabilityMaking life easier

 James Breeze, Chief Experience Officer, Breezable

Pty. Ltd.www.breezable.com

 james@breezable.com

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'People' do the searching

• Search is about 'find'

– Understand what people want

–  "Findability precedes usability, in the Alphabet and on the Web , you can't usewhat you can't find“ Morville, 2005 

See links: http://www.findability.org/

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What do people search for?

• How do your customers/staff talk

– Ask and listen

• Find out– Google Zeitgeist

– Google Trends

See links: SearchEngineWatch

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Users’ search ‘mentalmodel’

• Care with enterprise search

• Expectations are set by

• Box and button on all pages• List

See links: Nielsen on mental models

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Information retrieval

• What are your users’ objectives?

– Informational

– Transactional

– Navigational

See links: A taxonomy of Web search

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Organisational context

• Consider people, organization, andtechnology

• Search starts ‘before’ people get toyour site or to their desk

• Are search habits changing the webdesign culture?

See links: Improving customer experience blog

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Search Usability

• Visibility

• Formulation

• Expression• Query Entry

• Result Interpretation

• Error Recovery

See links: Search implementation, Buy Nielsen’s 29 search tips - $60

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Search Usability

• Contextually defined tabs/links

• Natural language search

–Don't expose the Boolean logic– Correct spelling

• URL strategy and good snippet

– Virality– Optimisation

See links: Clean URLs

“Short words are best and 

the old words when short are

best of all” Winston Churchill  

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Don’t expose the logic!

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Eyetracking and searchhabits

• Don’t forget context and emotion!

• Findings

–Banner blindness = search listingblindness

– Top 5 rank, not top 10

– ‘Golden Triangle’

See links: Listings blindness

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Eyetracking and searchhabits

• Increased snippet length

– Better for informational

– Worse for transactional

• More attention on snippet than URL

• Users only scan four results per page

• Users look farther down the list fornavigational queries

See links: Research findings and PDF

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Eyetracking and searchhabits

• For content accessed vianavigational searches, URLs shouldbe placed above the descriptions

• No differences between old vs young/ inexperienced vs experienced

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Helping yourself 

• References linked from .ppt - email james@breezable.com

• Other sites/blogs

– Search Engine Land

– What People Search For

– Ecommerce Search Report

– Search Tools For Websites and Intranets

– Copernic Desktop Search