Search UX Design Articles

Extensive collection of our search UX design articles: key design concepts, user experience strategies, tips and tricks for search and ecommerce user experiences.

Mobile Auto-Suggest on Steroids: Tap-Ahead Design Pattern

May 27th, 2011 By
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In contrast to desktop Web search, auto-suggest on mobile devices is subject to two additional limitations: typing avoidance and slower bandwidth. The new patent-pending design pattern, Tap-Ahead, uses continuous refinement to create an intuitive, authentically mobile auto-suggest solution. This helps dramatically reduce the amount of typing needed to enter queries, and utilizes slower mobile bandwidth in the most efficient manner. Using this novel design pattern, your customers can quickly access thousands of popular search term combinations by typing just a few initial characters.

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Immersive Mobile E-Commerce Search Using Drop-Down Menus

Mar 10th, 2011 By
Immersive Mobile E-Commerce Search Using Drop-Down Menus

Specialized drop-down menu are one of the ways of creating immersive experience in mobile e-commerce search UIs. A novel design pattern, status bar drop-down menu, allows 100% of the screen real estate to be dedicated to search results, while also providing convenient and intuitive access to navigation and filter functions.

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Faceted Finding with Super-Powered Breadcrumbs

Mar 10th, 2011 By
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Introducing Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb (IFB) design that integrates the power of faceted refinement with the intuitive query expansion afforded by browse.

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Designing Brand Landing Pages for Mobile Devices

Feb 21st, 2011 By
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People love to search by brand names. On the small screens of mobile devices, well-designed landing pages can provide a much better experience than keyword search results. This makes brand landing pages today’s biggest sleeper opportunity for mobile and tablet ecommerce. But you have to learn to be completely ruthless with your features and content. Here’s how.

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Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II

Jun 4th, 2010 By
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In Part I of Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search, I looked at Four Corners, Modal Overlay, Watermark, and Full-Page Refinement Options design patterns, which maximize the mobile screen real estate. This column covers strategies for making people aware of the filtering options and methods of improving transitions between the various states of a search user interface.

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Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part I

Apr 22nd, 2010 By
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In my previous Search Matters column, Designing Mobile Search: 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.

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Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities

Mar 8th, 2010 By
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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. Designing a great mobile search experience requires thinking differently: In terms of turning limitations into opportunities.

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Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices

Feb 8th, 2010 By
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Filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing in faceted search, because many sites have not been able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner. In this column I cover how to show discrete numeric values, avoid overly constrained filter states, and display key inventory information, and introduce a novel pattern of histogram sliders.

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More Like This: A Design Pattern

Jan 19th, 2010 By
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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 ». Unfortunately, most sites do not make sufficient use of this pattern and some that do use it design and implement it incorrectly.

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Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World

Jan 19th, 2010 By
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Our language is limited and imperfect. When a customer constructs a query that may have more than one meaning, a good search user interface provides tools to help the customer define the query in less ambiguous terms, so the search results more closely match the person’s intention. This process is known as disambiguation.

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