Search boxes are useful so they are everywhere! Yet they are treated with disdain, as secondary class elements, hidden away in the corners and pushed to the side of other ‘more important’ content. Only put there as a last resort for frustrated users who cannot navigate to their destination. As if to try and make users feel like they failed when they have to use the search box.

If you treat it your search box this badly it will never provide you its full potential value. The search box gives your users a way to tell you, in their own words, what they want and what they expect you to have. You do not need to guess these things, just read what they typed no further analysis required.

Be nice to your search box, be proud of it, put it center stage. Make it useful and a key part of your application, not the backup plan for users that failed to click the right links. Do this and every time a user arrives they will fill out a single question survey that tells you exactly what they want.

Tips on UX

Highlight your search box, put it top and center. Dont hide it in a corner and have the box styled to be white on white like many sites have. Facebook, Youtube, Amazon all have their search boxes center top and highlighted. Auto-complete is very useful and not only to reduce a users typing. It also provides hints and reduces spelling mistakes of the user. Try put into Amazon a common misspellings like “vaccum”, how many hints does it provide that you spelled it wrong before you actually search.

Tips on Analytics

Google Analytics provides a tool to measure and report on search queries. It can be a very useful guide to analyzing user behaviour. If you log both the search query and the number of results you return, you can look at the most common queries, but also find queries that return 0 results. These can be seen as the things that your users want that you don’t have. Satisfying the most common query with 0 results is a very quick win for any application

Related Links

I got an email from a the guys over at swiftype who look to have a really nice looking search and analytics tool that covers the points I made above. I have not used this tool (so this is not an endorsement), but I would love to hear from anyone who has used swifttype and hear their opinion (maybe in the comments down below).