Principles of Site Design

Make site search visible

Users looking for specific information usually turn to search - so search should be one of the first things mobile users see on your site, avoid hiding it behind a menu. In the study, participants responded best to easily-visible, open text search boxes at the top of a page.

Ensure site search results are relevant

Search should be smart, providing users with the best and most relevant results so they don’t have to swipe through multiple pages of results. Make life easier for users with smart-search features like autocomplete, corrected misspellings and suggesting search terms or providing related matches.

Participants didn’t bother to swipe through multiple pages of search results. Instead, they judged a site’s search based on the results it returned first, so make sure your first page of search results are the strongest.

Implement filters to narrow results

Provide easy to use filters to help narrow the search results to more relevant results for users. Participants relied on filters to narrow down search results, and actually abandoned sites that couldn’t reduce volume. However, you also need to ensure users don’t filter themselves into a box - one car dealer site allowed participants to specify configurations that didn’t actually exist. Help users avoid problems by letting them know how many results will be returned with a particular filter applied.

Don’t bury the filters at the bottom of the page where users have to scroll to the end of the result set before they can begin to filter what they’re looking for.

Guide users to better site search results

For sites that serve diverse customer segments, it can be helpful to ask users a few questions before they search to ensure they get results from the most relevant content segment.

For example, a large shoe retailer began its mobile searches by having participants select the gender and size of shoe they were looking for.