Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II
Originally Published on UXMatters.com May 3, 2010 ⇒
In Part I of “Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search,” I looked at the challenges and opportunities of mobile faceted search. To address the well-known challenge of limited screen real estate on mobile devices, I covered the Four Corners, Modal Overlay, Watermark, and Full-Page Refinement Options design patterns, which maximize the real estate available for search results on a mobile device. This month’s column covers strategies for making people more aware of the filtering options that are available to them, as well as methods of improving transitions between the various states a user encounters in a search user interface.
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Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part I
Originally Published on UXMatters.com April 5, 2010 ⇒
In my previous Search Matters column, “Mobile Finding: Turning Limitations into Opportunity,” I discussed how mobile search user experiences differ from those on the Web. In this and my next column, I’ll look specifically at the challenges and opportunities of mobile faceted search. This column covers design patterns for maximizing the real estate available for search results, while the next will cover strategies for making people aware of filtering options.
Faceted search is extremely helpful for certain kinds of finding—particularly for ecommerce apps. Unfortunately, the designers of mobile applications do not have established user interface paradigms they can follow or abundant screen real estate for presenting facets and filters in a separate area on the left or at the top of a screen. To implement faceted search on mobile devices, we need to get creative rather than following established Web design patterns. Join me in exploring the Four Corners, Modal Overlay, Watermark, and Refinement Options design patterns for mobile devices. Following these patterns can move us one step closer to making faceted search a usable reality on mobile devices.
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Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities
Originally Published on UXmatters.com March 8, 2010 ⇒
Thinking of porting your Web finding experience to iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile? Just forget about the fact that these devices are basically full-featured computers with tiny screens. Having gone through this design exercise a few times, I have realized that designing a great mobile finding experience requires a way of thinking that is quite different from our typical approach to designing search for Web or desktop applications. To put it simply, designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities. In this column, I’ll discuss some of the limitations of mobile platforms, as well as the opportunities they afford, and share a few design ideas that might come in handy for your own projects.
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Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices
Originally published on UXMatters.com February 8, 2010 ⇒
Faceted search has been around for a long time and has become the de facto standard for search on most ecommerce sites. However, filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing, because many sites have not able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner. Recently, powerful user interface controls called sliders have become all the rage for specifying numeric attributes in finding user interfaces. Unfortunately, in their rush to implement this latest, greatest feature, many companies have not designed easy-to-use sliders. Rather than solving usability problems, poorly designed sliders create even more issues around numeric filter usability. In my experience, the following three usability issues surface most often with numeric filters:
- representing discrete values for aspects as sets of ranges
- inadvertently emphasizing overly constrained filter states
- being parsimonious with inventory information
In this column, I’ll examine each of these issues and present the best practices that solve these problems.
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More Like This: A Design Pattern
Originally Published on UXMatters.com January 4, 2010 ⇒
In my last installment of Search Matters, “Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World,” I presented several design strategies for query disambiguation.
Unfortunately, most sites do not make sufficient use of this pattern and some that do use it design and implement it incorrectly.
Show Me More
The idea behind the More Like This pattern is very simple: within each group of items representing a particular category from a catalog or accompanying each item in search results, provide a prominent link or button with a label that is some variation of More Like This ». Of course, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Continue reading →
Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 2
Co-written with Frank Guo ⇒
Originally published on UXMatters.com November 2, 2009 ⇒
In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. If you missed it, read Part 1, which covered these best practices:
- Integrate your ads’ appearance with the rest of your site.
- Make sure customers can easily distinguish ads from content.
- Keep ads relevant and appropriate.
- Understand how your customers interact with ads.
In Part 2, we’ll discuss the following best practices:
- Understand what makes a good ad.
- Limit cannibalization.
- Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising.
- Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results.
Let’s dig in! Continue reading →
Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 1
Co-written with Frank Guo ⇒
Originally published on UXMatters.com October 5, 2009 ⇒
Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers. Continue reading →
Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
Originally published on UXMatters.com on September 7, 2009 ⇒
Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results, as follows:
- Decide on your filter value-selection paradigm—either drill-down or parallel selection.
- Provide an obvious and consistent way to undo filter selection.
- Always make all filters easily available.
- At every step in the search workflow, display only filter values that correspond to the available items, or inventory.
- Provide filter values that encompass all items, or the complete inventory.
By following the attribute-based filtering design best practices this article describes, you can ensure your customers can take care of business without having to spend time struggling with your search user interface. Continue reading →
Brave New World of Visual Browsing
Co-written with Ahmed Riaz ⇒
Originally published on UXMatters.com August 3, 2009 ⇒
When the Web began, pages were mostly text, but today, everywhere we look, it seems like image content is taking over the Web. The ubiquitous use of digital cameras and improvements in the picture quality of mobile phone cameras has likely helped this phenomenon along. The shift toward content that is primarily visual introduces new challenges and opportunities for developing intuitive and powerful user interfaces for browsing, searching, and filtering visual content. To help me cover this important topic, I’ve asked Ahmed Riaz—Interaction Designer at eBay and physical interaction design enthusiast—to contribute his insights and ideas. Continue reading →
The Mystery of Filtering by Sorting
Originally published on UXMatters.com July 6, 2009 ⇒
What is the difference between filtering and sorting for a search query? Any SQL developer would be happy to tell you that a sort translates to a SQL ORDER BY statement, while a SQL WHERE clause performs a filter. However, for most users of consumer-facing ecommerce applications, the difference between a sort and a filter presents a mystery they understand dimly, if at all. The distinction between sorting and filtering blurs, because of a phenomenon I’ve called filtering by sorting, which leads to all sorts of interesting search user interface implications. Continue reading →
Search Results Satori: Balancing Pogosticking and Page Relevance
Originally published on UXMatters.com June 8, 2009 ⇒
When designing the data and layout for search results pages, the design strategy boils down to a single key principle: show the greatest number of results possible, without increasing pogosticking. In other words, the challenge is finding the right balance between
- providing enough information in individual search results, so customers can make informed decisions about whether to view product detail pages—that is, click product links
- providing enough relevant search results on each page of results to warrant further exploration of the site
On the one hand, if your search results do not provide enough summary product information, you’ll force your customers to jump to individual product detail pages, then repeatedly back and forth between product detail and search results pages, like a child bouncing on a pogo stick. On the other hand, if you do not provide enough search results on each page of results, customers may not find relevant results, so may leave your site. As we will see presently, the tension between these two opposing design forces is what makes the problem of creating search user interfaces so interesting. Continue reading →
Making $10,000 a Pixel: Optimizing Thumbnail Images in Search Results
Originally published on UXMatters.com May 11, 2009 ⇒
In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues.
While your Web site’s image requirements are likely unique, there are some common pitfalls you might encounter in using images in your search results. The good news is that you can easily avoid most of these mistakes with awareness and a little foresight. Continue reading →
Searching Help: Don’t Even Go There
Co-written with Tricia Clement of jUXtworks.com ⇒
Originally published on UXMatters.com Published: April 13, 2009 ⇒
Web site user assistance that consistently exceeds customer’s expectations can catapult your company to legendary status and create brand equity you can measure in billions of dollars. However, making Help a strategic asset for your company is an arduous task. To shed light on this important topic, I have teamed up with Tricia Clement, a renowned cognitive psychologist and Web site user assistance expert. In this month’s Search Matters column, we’ll deliver actionable insights about Web site user assistance. Continue reading →
Choosing the Right Search Results Page Layout: Make the Most of Your Width
Originally published on UXMatters.com March 9, 2009 »
Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe.
To see for yourself the narrow divide between great and barely usable search results layouts, take a look at Figure 1, which shows the primary gateway to the Starbucks shopping area. When it comes to page layout, this Starbucks search results page shows very poor design choices. At a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, most of what you see is the left margin of the layout and a large logo. Continue reading →
Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages
Originally published on UXMatters.com February 9, 2009 »
Search results pages are some of the most visited pages on typical e-commerce sites—to say nothing of a search engine like Google. Many articles appear each year about optimal search algorithms, database performance, and the like. In contrast, very few publications focus on improving the search experience from the customer’s perspective. My new Search Matters column aims to fill this gap by focusing on:
- best practices of search user interface (UI) design
- design patterns and strategies for improved search user interfaces
- common search UI pitfalls
- how to use search to provide maximum value to customers and your business
- practical search UI matters that have strategic impact on your customers’ Web site experience
Experience Partners: Giving Center Stage to Customer Delight
This article was originally published on UXMatters.com April 12, 2008 »
Today, the design industry is at the threshold of a new epoch—a point of theoretically limitlessness potential for expansion. We must decide just how, going forward, we will relate to the people who use our designs—as people who are “busy and eager to get on with it” yet “alert and caring” or, much less constructively, as people who are merely “simple-minded and stupid.” Therefore, I want to propose the concept of experience partners as a whole new way of thinking about our customers as partners in holistic product experiences. We need new terminology to describe this concept, because the term users limits us to old ways of thinking about the world we live in and the products we develop. The term experience partners reflects an emerging paradigm shift from a focus on product features to instead conceptualizing holistic product experiences and embodies our best understanding of how to design products that create delight and become integral, harmonious parts of people’s lives. Continue reading →
Improve the Usability of Search-Results Pages: Add Sophisticated but Easy-to-Use Filtering and Sorting Controls
Originally Published in JavaWorld.com, January 23, 2006 ⇒
E.R. Tufte, in his phenomenal book Envisioning Information, states, “Clarity and simplicity are completely opposite of simple-mindedness.” This false simple-mindedness is often evident in the design of a search-results page. Even on some of the leading e-commerce sites, this important page is frequently made hard to use by excessive visual clutter or the complete absence of appropriate sorting and filtering controls. This is especially daunting as more and more raw data return as search results, without the appropriate tools to manipulate them.
A well-designed search-results page is well worth the effort, since it is the key to helping your users successfully achieve their goals and enticing them back to your site. The engineering challenge is to provide just the right kind of sophisticated yet easy-to-use sorting and filtering tools that map well to your customers’ goals and mental models. In this article, I present some design ideas to start you on your way to creating a more usable search-results page. Continue reading →
Plotting PIA
Cohesive “real-world” guidance to creating, mapping, and deploying .NET Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). Practical advice on creating PIAs, three alternative methods for .NET solution mapping, and robust ClearCase integration using absolute file path. Published in ASP.NET Pro November 2005 »
Timestamp-Based Caching Framework: Current Data with Peak Performance
Originally Published on JavaWorld.com, January 3, 2005 ⇒
Build a dynamic LRU cache framework using standard Java utility classes
In his timeless masterpiece, The Art of War, Sun Tzu states: “…one who is skilled in warfare principles …takes the enemy’s walled city without attacking… His aim must be to take All-Under-Heaven intact. Therefore, weapons will not be blunted, and gains will be intact.”
When we garbage-collect perfectly good objects, we “blunt our weapons” and waste precious system resources by re-creating these objects all over again. By implementing a caching framework, we hope that most of our “gains” resulting from our creation of complex objects will remain “intact.” If we store completed objects in the cache, we avoid repeatedly re-creating these objects and thus enjoy a boost in application performance.
Time-to-live, or TTL, caching systems answer the needs of most applications that can afford to use slightly stale data. However, if the objects we cache contain time-sensitive pricing or availability information, they must always remain up to date and cannot be shown to the user as stale. These objects have no reliable time-to-live attribute, and to cache them effectively, we must employ different approaches. One successful approach, a timestamp-based caching framework (TBCF), is presented in this article. Continue reading →
Web-Based Distributed Systems with XML: Loan Exchange B2B Company Case Study
The idea of building effective Web-based distributed systems has been around for a long time. However, much of the efforts have been unsuccessful, largely due to the loose and fuzzy nature of the web architecture, and because HTML and proprietary formats, the two most common web communication mechanisms, do not lend themselves well to sharing data across time, space and communities. Recently, however, a fundamentally new standard of web communication, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), has come into being. XML is human and machine readable, self-validating, flexible and object-oriented. This paper highlights the challenges of adopting the HTML and proprietary formats for DS communication using a loan exchange B2B company and examines how XML solves these challenges making it a superior tool for Web DS integration. Continue reading →
Beginings of Social Networking: Business Process Redesign With Vertical Net Communities
The new e-conomy is not just about having a website that provides certain customer services on the Internet. Rather it embraces a concept of Vertical Net Communities. VNCs are changing the way customers interact with data through a slew of services made possible by technologies such as electronic data exchange, secure credit card processing and sophisticated communication tools. VNCs are reshaping entire industries by providing a new level of customization of content and commerce and by engaging the users in producing information. Among others, VNCs are transforming Investment Information and Business-to-Business Trading into the mass-customized, user-driven environments. Continue reading →