One participant in a usability test was shopping for a new suitcase on JC Penney’s website. Make sure every suggested query actually has good, relevant results. If you’re planning to implement or improve your site’s search suggestions, follow these tips to make them as helpful as possible. Conversely, if something isn’t shown as a search suggestion after entering the first few characters of a product name, some users may conclude that the site doesn’t offer that product and abandon the site without even executing the search. In some cases, particularly when the query phrase is short, it is easier for users to just finish typing out the query themselves, rather than to reacquire their mouse or tap the screen.įor site search, search suggestions have the further benefit of informing users of the range of products or options offered by the site.
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Users could read the suggestions to see what’s available on the site, how to spell difficult terms, and what other users search for. However, even when users didn’t actually choose from the list of query suggestions, the feature still had the potential to provide some benefits as a reference. The margin of error for this proportion is 7%.)
(There were 31 suggestions selected out of 136 instances where suggestions were offered. In our recent study on ecommerce websites, suggested queries were selected by users in only 23% of the instances where they were offered. Interestingly, even though users expect this feature and sometimes comment on it when it isn’t available on a site, they don’t always actually use it. Use less mental effort to search, because they can simply recognize the right words or phrasing they want.Avoid typos, because they don’t need to type out the entire query themselves.Decrease interaction cost, because they can type less.Pick an appropriate term, which will show them good results, rather than making up a query which might have no results or poor results.
When your users select from search suggestions rather than typing in their own complete query, they benefit because they: This change in expectations is likely a result of users’ frequent exposure to query suggestions on Google, which always sets the (unrealistic) standard of what a “good” search feature should be. In recent years, search suggestions have become an expected sign of a well-designed search feature. These recommendations appear beneath the search box and change as users type each letter of their query. (In this article, we use the term “site search” to refer to a website’s own search feature - that only searches within that single site’s content - as opposed to web-wide search engines like Google, Bing, or Baidu that search across multiple sites.)ĭefinition: Search suggestions are recommended queries that appear in a dropdown as users type in a search box. Search suggestions (sometimes also called autocomplete or autosuggest) used to be an optional, nice-to-have feature for site search.
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