Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 1

Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 1: "Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 1

By Jared M. Spool

Originally published: Jul 09, 2008

When creating a search results page, it's unfortunately too easy to produce an ineffective design. We know this because, in the course of our research, we've studied hundreds of search results pages. Many of the pages we've studied hurt the user's experience purely because of their design.

A slew of problems occur when users encounter an ineffective search results page: Users can't identify what is relevant to their search. Many of the links are irrelevant to them. They find it hard to tell the differences between the various results, making the choice difficult. These problems force users to click into each result, often ending with them abandoning the search altogether.

The good news is we've seen many effective search results pages. This means there's hope. It also means we can start to look for patterns that separate the effective designs from their less effective counterparts.
Good Design Doesn't Just Happen

In our research, every time we found a site where the search results were doing what they should, we also found a team that had worked really hard to make it that way.

Those teams all have something in common. They've experimented thoroughly, trying out dozens of designs"