Designing Effective Search
Since I started my design journey, it feels at times really tempting to think about what I am creating as it’s own little island or universe of something that I am making. And it’s really useful in lots of ways as part of the design process to at times take a clean slate approach. And think about things from scratch. But ultimately, when you do the design, no site is an island. And that’s especially true on the web. It’s really tempting to take the narcissistic view that people come to your site, they spend five or ten minutes there, they’re fully involved when they’re doing that. And that they’re having an immersive experience. But in reality, people are often trying to see through your design to get to the information that they seek. And that’s true whether it’s to learn something, to buy something, or just have fun. And what this means is that on the web, especially, all designs are interconnected. I am going to be talking about few of the best practices in the context of Web. But, a lot of it goes beyond web.
Search in very basic terms is just the curiosity. Nearly everybody is doing something on the web. And, here is a simple example that we all go through in a day at least once. I was recently watching a video by a most followed You-tuber and I was so hooked by the audio track used in the video. Unfortunately, I did not find the details in the description so I started my search and like 90% of us, I used google as my search engine. I tried to listen to the lyrics carefully and searched the terms in google. And this is great, you can see it’s got the songs right there, you got the information you need, and you’re done. Now what’s notable about this interaction is that I had a mini task that I was curious about, and I was able to execute it using YouTube as a resource.
Now, for the most interesting part, I almost never use any of the navigation in the site. Especially, the subscribers list. I mostly browse and hit on the video which I find interesting. Whilst I am involved in browsing, I am thinking it as a less of the interaction with the app but rather as the accomplishment of the task.
The real politic of design is that you take the user’s intentional capacity, you draw out five seconds of that or so, realize there’s seven other things happening, and what’s yours is that tiny sliver of that five seconds. Its best not to assume the search mastery which means users do not always know the search space let alone the keywords to be used in search.
Well, using that five seconds how would I want to change few things which would help users in having a better experience with search? and not get lost in the myriad of other things happening simultaneously? The answer to that is the simple and very basic “Aha” moment — Pro-activeness.
It is one of the better solutions when done well will:
- Help guide novice users
- Provide shortcut for experts
- Helps convey categories & organization
- Provide serendipitous experience to users
But, there is a downside to everything and it so does with pro activeness as well, from my example above of YouTube, a lot of times, I usually get lost in scrolling and browsing through the other recommended videos that my idea of an focused island experience is lost.
As a designer finding this fine balance between the island experience and the distraction is the effective way to help users with the search. Yes, it feels that these things are really simple and easier problem to solve but, really making this change of the search mastery to the guided mastery make the user experience worth while.
Happy designing everyone!
