Greg Nudelman - Designing Search: UX Strategies for ECommerce Success

Part I:

Optimizing eCommerce Search Results Pages

Search is a wicked problem of terrific consequence the defining element of user experience. It changes the way we find everything It shapes how we learn and what we believe. Peter Morville

Chapter 1 Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages

Chapter 2 How Shoppers Search

Chapter 3 Choosing the Right Search Results Page Layout

Chapter 4 Balancing Pogosticking and Page Relevance

Chapter 5 Making $10,000 a Pixel: Optimizing Thumbnail Images in Search Results

Chapter 6 Best Practices for Ads in Search Results

Chapter 1

Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages

• The No Search Results Page: Your Key to Competitive Search Advantage page 4
• Create a Robust Partial Match Strategy page 11
• Employ Multiple Content Strategies page 15
• Case Study: Hotmail No Search Results Page page 17
• How Can Your Site-Search Analytics Help You, by Louis Rosenfeld page 19

Search, more than any other activity, is a living, evolving process of discoverya conversation between a customer and the Web site. Unfortunately, this conversation is often fraught with miscommunication, and so it is critical for you to keep this conversation going even when the customer has initiated a search that yielded no results.

Unfortunately, the typical product team has no coherent strategy for cases when there are no search results, generally treating such occurrences as a user error. Most teams spend the bulk of their design phase working on the search results pages for a successful search. Then in the harried moments prior to launch, the engineers hurriedly slap something together for the no search results page. Such an approach is detrimental to the success of a customers search experience.

In my experience, the effort and ingenuity a product team invests in the no search results page is indicative of its overall dedication to customer success. Ignoring this special kind of search results page virtually guarantees a mediocre search experience and contributes to obscurity in the ecommerce marketplace. On the other hand, if a team thinks creatively about the case when there are no search results and focuses on customer needs, it can turn a temporary snag in communication into an opportunity for deeper connection and a source of tremendous competitive advantage.

The No Search Results Page: Your Key to Competitive Search Advantage

To see how original thinking about the no search results page can revolutionize an entire industry, consider the history of Google. Although a relative latecomer to an already saturated search market, Google blew away all competition through an unapologetic dedication to customer success. One critical innovation was the Google Did you mean feature, which gave the process of discovery a safety net and made exploration more fun. This feature was the result of deliberate and original thinking about how to help people correct the misspellings that were a common cause of the appearance of the no search results page. Controlled vocabulary substitution redefined the way Google does search, and today, the Did you mean feature shown in is a virtual necessity for a successful search implementation.

The Google Did you mean feature

If you want to create a killer search app, begin with the no search results page. Starting from zero forces your team to address the most difficult design questions up front and honestly assess your engineering budget and capabilities. More important, your team can define the entire search user interface design problem more preciselyin a compelling and possibly even original way.

No Search Results Strategy: Not a Zero-Sum Game

No simple set of rules exist that guarantees a successful implementation of a no search results page. However, the following four broad design principles provide a useful starting point:

Dont be afraid to say I did not understand. Clearly indicate there are no search results, so your customer can recover.

Focus on providing a way out. Make sure every control on the search results page does something productive to help resolve the no search results condition.

Create a robust partial match strategy. Over-constraining is the most frequent mistake people make when searching ecommerce sites. Having a robust partial match strategy is critical.

Employ multiple content strategies. Draw from multiple sources to provide the most relevant content first to aid recovery from the no search results condition, while staying true to your customers original intent.

Now look at some examples of how you can combine these design principles creatively to develop both compelling customer experiences and opportunities for business success.

Dont Be Afraid to Say I Did Not Understand

Clear communication of system state forms the foundation of all human-computer interaction. In his Alertbox blog post Ten Usability Heuristics, Jacob Nielsen put Visibility of system status at #1. If customers cannot understand that a search system did not find what they asked for, they cant take the appropriate corrective action. Yet many search applications do not display the no search results condition clearly or accurately.

. Can you tell whether the system found what the customer searched for?

does not communicate zero search results effectively

On the Morningstar search results page, there is no explicit message that states No results found . The only zero on the page appears in the black bar in the form of 1-0 of 0 , which does not make much sense. Compare the Morningstar page with the Google page shown in .

Google clearly communicates a zero search results condition and often takes appropriate corrective action automatically

The status message on the Google search results page is clear and straightforward: Showing results for oppenheimer funds. Search instead for apenheimer funds , making it obvious that the system assumed a misspelling and made the most likely substitution automatically. In case the person actually did want to search for apenheimer , Google also makes the original query available. Clicking Search instead for apenheimer funds yields the result shown in in the lower right.

If you look carefully, you noticed that this Google system behavior is a little different than the Did you mean: implementation shown in . This system behavior demonstrates another key principle: The best design for your application is the one that works best for a particular query, your audience, and your business model. There are no hard-and-fast rules for implementing any of the strategies that handle no search results conditions. Even the industrys best sites work tirelessly to make continuous, small improvements. No search results pages are critical to your sites success, so it pays to keep a particularly close eye on any design changes to make sure that they are indeed providing a better experience for your customers. That is why it is important to continuously test and evaluate the performance of your no search results pages using A/B testing (see sidebar).