Part of the E-Commerce User Experience Series

You can’t sell a product that your customers can’t find. Your site must accommodate all types of searches and adequately return results for categories, products, and product characteristics. Search is a critical element of building a profitable website. In our most recent e-commerce usability study, 83% of users searched on one or more sites.

This 153-page report contains 62 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 141 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Even though some of the design guidelines are specific to searching for products, many of the guidelines apply to all forms of web searches, whether general websites or intranets.

Benefits

• Checklist of 62 guidelines for designing a search tool that helps customers find your products and services
• Understand how customers search for products and services so that you facilitate the process
• Common usability mistakes to avoid when designing a search feature

Topics

• Why users search
• What users search for
• Search visibility
• Presenting search results
• Narrowing product choices: Guided navigation or faceted search
• Query length
• Narrowing the choices
• Supporting users' searches
• Advanced and scoped searches

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in these reports is based on two separate rounds of e-commerce studies, including:

• One-on-one usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal study
• Eyetracking

In, total 108 people tested 206 e-commerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and China (Hong Kong).