flickr.com/optimusmegan
If your work involves user experience in any way, you should be familiar with design patterns. Bringing patterns into your design will help you define and solve common problems related to user interaction and information architecture. Sharing patterns with your team help you establish a common vocabulary, in turn making it easier to convert past experience into new solutions. Resources like the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is one of many pattern libraries I turn to for ideas and inspiration in my daily work.
Designing Web Interfaces brings us 12 standard screen patterns for Rich Internet Application (RIA) design. Both “03. Search/Results” and “04. Filter Datasets” are closely related to search applications. Search result filtering is also known as faceted search, a design pattern put into good use on websites like eg. kayak.com and oodle.com. iGoogle is a good example of a search-driven dashboard (“07. Dashboard”).
Peter Morville has gathered a collection of search patterns on Flickr, complete with examples from live websites. Patterns like Best Bets, Auto-Suggest and Structured Results (Universal Search) should be in the vocabulary of all managers, UX designers, information architects, interaction designers, and developers working with enterprise search.
Save time tomorrow, by spending some time today reading up on search design patterns.
Great post! Getting insight on the tools in use by creative individuals is very useful! Next up: applying the “Collectible achievement” pattern to our news site
@Thomas Kjelsrud
I’m only happy to share my own sources of inspiration. Maybe I’ll regret that the day you don’t need me anymore
Hehe, don’t worry – I don’t think it works that way
Regarding patterns, have a look at:
http://patterntap.com/tap/collection/search
http://patterntap.com/tap/collection/404-pages
There should be a pattern for “search returned 0 hits”, as there are numerous ways of providing something of more use than an empty page.
Absolutely! There’s little help to get from a blank page if your search returns 0 hits.
Spellchecking should be included, in case of mispelled search terms (pun intended). A simple “did you mean” link may be all you need.
Best Bets could also be useful, based on what’s popular or in frequent demand. It’s a fair chance that the unlucky searcher may be looking for the same thing other visitors are looking for. How about popular search terms? Or recent terms, for that matter?
You can also guide the unlucky searcher to the site navigation, I think. Browsing may be a better strategy if you have no clue of what to search for.
Can you think of other zero hit search result strategies?
Jared Spool has some thoughts on good designs for sero hit search result pages (second part of a longer article): http://www.uie.com/articles/search_results_part2/
You clearly want to tell the user that the item(s) sought for are not available, Jared says. Instead, most search pages often produce a list of random results, none of which complete the user’s quest. When you decide to present possibly related items, make sure they are relevant for the user’s task.
Also, don’t make the mistake made by Best Buy, when they show products on the result page that are actually sold out (which you find out only when you move to the individual product pages).