Search Design? We Wrote the Book.
“Search is the key to ecommerce, but search is more than a technology – it’s an experience. Greg Nudelman helps you understand search as an interactive design challenge and gives you the patterns to implement solutions.” – Pete Bell, CEO of Endeca
If you’re designing user experiences on the web or mobile, we can help you start with a foundation of great search. Search is not just a feature – it is a mission-critical strategic platform on which your customers interact with your site. Great search allows your customers to find the content and products they did not yet know they need. Search delivers amazing delights. Search is the key to customer loyalty. And search keeps the cash register ringing.
Designing Search? We offer a complete range of services to analyze, design and build your perfect search solution. Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation »
Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
Office Depot multiple-select attribute-based faceted search redesign misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. This makes it an excellent case study for demonstrating best practices for designing filters for faceted search results.
Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices
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.
More Like This: A Design Pattern
Even better on touch screens.
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.
Mobile Auto-Suggest on Steroids: Tap-Ahead Design Pattern
May 27th, 2011 by Greg Nudelman. No Comments Yet
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.
Tags: Mobile and Tablet UX Design Articles • Patent • Smashing Magazine • UX Design
Immersive Mobile E-Commerce Search Using Drop-Down Menus
Mar 10th, 2011 by Greg Nudelman. No Comments Yet
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.
Tags: Mobile and Tablet UX Design Articles • Search UX Design Articles • UX Design • UXMagazine
Faceted Finding with Super-Powered Breadcrumbs
Mar 10th, 2011 by Greg Nudelman. No Comments Yet
Introducing Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb (IFB) design that integrates the power of faceted refinement with the intuitive query expansion afforded by browse.
Tags: BoxesandArrows • Search UX Design Articles • UX Design • UX Research
Designing Brand Landing Pages for Mobile Devices
Feb 21st, 2011 by Greg Nudelman. No Comments Yet
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.
Tags: brands • iPhone • landing pages • Mobile and Tablet UX Design Articles • Search UX Design Articles • UX Design
Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II
Jun 4th, 2010 by Greg Nudelman. No Comments Yet
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.
Tags: faceted search • iPhone • Mobile and Tablet UX Design Articles • Search UX Design Articles • tablet • UX Design • UXmatters
But it requires a new level of sophistication, discipline and minimalist thinking. With years of experience designing mobile and tablet experiences for top firms like eBay, Wells Fargo, WebEx and IBM comes expertise. Knowing when to follow design patterns. When to break them. And when to invent new approaches that redefine the industry.
Designing for Mobile or Tablet? For a free 30 minute consultation, 
If you are designing for web or mobile, you can't afford to ignore search. Search is more than mere technology. It is an experience. A moment of flow, of meaning. A quiet conversation with your customer. That is why I wrote 
User experience design means anticipating and taking care of key details. So your customers don't have to. A superior level of service, that makes doing business with your company a delight. You need good design. But you don't need to spend a fortune. Our 80/20 rapid design, prototyping and testing process ensures very doable, step-wise improvements that ultimately create 10-20X ROI.
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