Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design

This article is Part 2 of 4, focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.

Online Search

Search is used by a large proportion of web surfers, whether its from the Google homepage, an integrated search toolbar at the top of their web browser, or within a particular site, to name just a few examples.

Best Practice Tips for Search Implementation

As a quick summary of best practice when implementing search within a site, here are my top 6 tips:

• the search facility should be consistently placed on each page within the site
• the search facility should be highly visible and not part of a cluttered user interface
• the search facility should be located as near to the top of the site as possible, close to the brand logo
• the search facility should look like a search facility, therefore its styling should be minimal at most
• the search facility should be an intelligent, accurate and integrated piece of functionality, part of a wide range of findability methods provided
• the search facility should provide intelligent content or product suggestions as a user is typing out their search term

PRWD Search Providing Intelligent Product Suggestions

For modern, standard compliant web browsers, the PRWD E-commerce platform features our dynamic HybridSearch feature which, based upon user input into the search box, delivers dynamic product selections based on an algorithm developed by the Sam Clark.

The product predictions this provides are based on both wildcard and fulltext searching, and in line with the previous article on the intelligent tagging engine, HybridSearch also looks at all the tags associated with each product.

Benefits of Suggestive, or Predictive, Search

• Suggestive search provides links in realtime to actual product or information pages which exist within your website, minimising the amount of ‘no results found’ search result pages
• Suggestive search provides suggestions for products and content that actually exist within your website which the user may not have realised existed, therefore expanding the appeal that your sites content has for that person
• Suggestive search provides customer engagement and intelligent feedback, increasing the perception of the visitor that your site is helping its visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, speeding up their shopping journey
• Suggestive search can not only provide basic information for each result, it can also be implemented to display user centered information such as % savings, date of content, relevancy to your search term and other valuable information, providing increased amounts of sub-conscious triggers in which certain types of visitor behaviour will respond to
• Suggestive search adds a valuable navigational method to a sites findability methods, increasing the chances of a visitor quickly locating the product or content that best suits their wants and needs

With all this intelligence you can almost guarantee that if Contact Packaging sell the types of products you are searching for, the predictive search results will provide you with all the suitable products in the store.

In addition to each product suggestion containing a small image, the product title and the price range, an additional piece of product information shown is any saving that is available on any SKU for each particular product. This was a key addition to the product suggestion display as this provides the price conscious/sale hungry visitor with essential information to encourage a positive buying decision, which in turns is one of the ways in which persuasion architecture is used.

Persuasion Architecture Explored

For more of my views on persuasion architecture my user experience of House of Fraser talks about this area of user experience in some detail.

Continually Evolving PRWD HybridSearch Feature

As with the bespoke tag engine, the search feature will be continually enhanced to add greater power, relevancy, speed and sorting of content/product suggestions, and the search feature is something which will be implemented on a wide range of sites, both content driven, transactional and other business systems, such as account management facilities.

Following this post going live I will shortly follow up by talking in depth about the Dynamic Categories and Shop by Situation available at Contact Packaging.

Your comments please…!

I’m very interested to hear about your thoughts on the effectiveness of predictive search features, especially when users quickly type in their search string and hit return, without their being sufficient split second pause for the dynamic suggestions to be delivered.

Apart from the Google search toolbar, which sites do you feel are executing intelligent suggestive search most appropriately?

Tags: Findability, retailing, suggestive search, UCDcommerce