February 1, 2006

Search Me

At my suggestion, a client decided to add a global search function to his business website. The project designer created a mockup I didn't so much like (the search box didn't feel fully integrated with the rest of the design), so I went online to find examples of well-integrated search boxes. What I found instead was a surprising number of otherwise excellent sites with no search function. To my mind, and obviously there are those who disagree, search is a core usability feature, one that should be included, consistently and comprehensively, on all but the smallest, simplest websites.

I've since done some research on the issue, with scant results. The only relevant study I could find was conducted by Jacob Neilsen in 1997—several eons ago in web years. Are his results still valid? I don't know, but they certainly gibe with my intuition. Neilsen discovered that users have two contrasting approaches to site navigation:

Our usability studies show that more than half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behavior. The search-dominant users will usually go straight for the search button when they enter a website: they are not interested in looking around the site; they are task-focused and want to find specific information as fast as possible. In contrast, the link-dominant users prefer to follow the links around a site: even when they want to find specific information, they will initially try to get to it by following promising links from the home page. Only when they get hopelessly lost will link-dominant users admit defeat and use a search command.

Neilsen writes that as a rule of thumb, sites with more than 200 pages should offer search. This is where I disagree. Why not 100 pages, or even less? Currently the Luminous website has only 37 pages, and yet I already find myself using the search function when I can't remember where I wrote something.

By contrast, there's Adaptive Path. If you're not familiar with this group, they're an industry-leading user experience company. And they have a stellar website designed by the brilliant Doug Bowman. However their site, which comprises approximately 600 pages, has no search function. I discovered this while looking for usability studies about search. Someone on another site mentioned that Adaptive Path had written a piece on the subject, so I went to there to look for it. Since the site has no search function, I tried their Publications page, without success. Bowed but not beaten, I turned to Google, where I did a domain-specific search on the word "search" at "adaptivepath.com." (Note that most users, knowing nothing about domain-specific searches, would have given up here. It was the solution of an expert.) This produced what I was looking for: a 50-page report called "Site Content Search: A User Experience Analysis" (the report costs $149, so I decided to pass).

I don't mean to single out Adaptive Path, a company I respect and from which I've learned things. But how can one of the world's leading user experience groups get this wrong? And it's not just them. I turned up case after case of otherwise outstanding websites that either have no search function or one that appears on only certain pages or in different places on different pages. I really don't understand why this is. Can someone explain it to me?

Published in Search, Usability, WWW