Boxes and Arrows has a great article about Searching. The article is worth reading and the discussion thread is fantastic.

Stephen Turbek’s “Advancing Advanced Search” is a great chronicle of the good, the bad and the ugly on about advanced searches. My favorite part is when he writes about how we ended up where we are. “In the quest to make web sites more usable, we settled on a pattern of a clean, minimal search box with a link to an advanced search page. Jakob Nielsen recommended, ‘use an intimidating name like ‘advanced search’ to scare off novice users from getting into the page and hurting themselves.’”

Stephen dissects advanced searches, parameter searching, tagging, faceted, filtering, and progressive disclosure. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

In my experience designing interactions for higher education, financial services, b2b, healthcare and non-profit, search in general is a tool used by people who can’t find what they are looking for right away or people who know precisely what they are looking for and poses the vocabulary to get good results.

Regardless of simple or advanced search, search is used to find stuff (no duh, I know). My question is this: how would progressive search or even super-duper-complicated searches like the one found on google.com help users find the same information the second time they go looking for it?

Granted, this question is irrelevant for sites where content is transient, such as Expedia or Ebay, and for sites where the search index is always changing such as Google and Yahoo – but I insist this is an important question for sites where content is more fixed than it’s not.

Progressive searching could be a great way to help people find what they are looking for, but my gut tells me that its implementation would be more useful and appropriate for transient content.

Different sites have different search needs. Some sites don’t (and shouldn’t) have searches at all. Healthcare

Labels: boxes and arrows, progressive disclosure, search engines, usability

Add to Kinja | Post to Del.icio.us | Furl It | Permanent Link to this Post
posted by Andres Zapata @ 9:53 AM