designing for search: finders keepers by tom chi, google
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Finders Keepers: Effective Search Design
Tom Chi
Do you need search?
• Crutch or core flow? What’s its influence on awareness, sign-up, lead gen, & conversion?
SEO
Social
Direct/App
Content (or aggregator)
Ads/Direct
Search
SEO/SEM
Social
Partners
Goods(or aggregator)
Direct/Rev-Share/Ads
Search
Service/Utility Subs
Search
Consumer Orgs Ads
Marketplace Fees
Search
Buyers Sellers Ads
Using Search Beyond Search• Search infrastructure can scalably power browsing &
task flows
• Search behavior provides insights to customers expectations & opportunities
Effective Search Technology
• Fast - technology and design
• Relevant - rank what matters
• Comprehensive - cover enough ground
• Fresh - updates to meet expectations
searchquery
search box results page
Search Logs - Query Analysis
• Part of Speech Analysis
buy rainbow unicorns search
Nouns for strong indexing
Adjectives for refiners
Verbs for item actions
Informing Backend Structure
buy rainbow unicorns search
Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…
Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…
Buy now!
Buy now!
color: rainbow | white | gold | mottled | sparkle refiners
keywordsactions
Effective Search Design
buy rainbow unicorns search
Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…
Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…
Buy now!
Buy now!
color: rainbow | white | gold | mottled | sparkle
ping Rainbow Unicorn - $54 corn fans, get ready to rock! With a fier bow mane, and a spike of pure gold, le leaping unicorn…
: rainbow | white | gold | mottled
ow unicorns
in Rainbow Meadow Butterflies, Bunnies, and
ow Unic ready to r
Scannability, not Readability
• Searchers often read just 5-8 words per search, scan 30-50. Spend < 10 sec
• Bolding for Information Scent
• Visual Guideposts for Cognitive Savings
Context keyword context context, and more text that provides further context until the next keyword revealing even more.
In Theory…
In Practice…
While BrowsingWhile Searching
“Cognitive Budget” being Expended
Visual Rhythm for Multimedia
• Make media comparable - image normalization, quality
• Don’t disrupt text scanning flow• Create self-coherent info groupings that
can be absorbed in a glance
Graphical clustering, but text is scattered and too difficult to scan.
Good pacing, several ways / attributes to scan results. Uniform relevance vector.
Assistance, Spelling, Refiners• Searching is still difficult for many
• Assistance can speed up search task
• Relevance still matters, useless refiners can take people in the wrong direction
query search
query assistancequery term2querytastic term3
Did you mean: spell correction?
refiners
Additional Design Pointers• Multiple boxes - typically confusing
• Federated results - creates multiple #1s
• Zero Results Pages - recovery chance
query search
x xOption 1 Option 2
select query search
Leaping Rainbow Unicorn - $54Unicorn fans, get ready to rock! With a fierce rainbow mane, and a spike of pure gold, leon the leaping unicorn…
Unicorn in Rainbow Meadow - $22Legions of Butterflies, Bunnies, and Flowers have come to rainbow meadow, each with songs to share! Maestro Unicorn leads…
$36 $18
$13$149
