Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine

Description

Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices

By Smashing Magazine Editorial and György Fekete

On content-heavy websites, the search box is often the most frequently used design element. From a usability point of view, irritated users use the search function as a last option when looking for specific information on a website. If a website’s content is not organized properly, an efficient search engine is not only helpful but crucial, even for basic website navigation. In fact, search is the user’s lifeline to mastering complex websites . The best designs offer a simple search box on the home page and play down advanced search and scoping.

In practice, websites tend to grow over time , adding new content and, more importantly for us, adding new navigation options, such as additional content sections. However, these new content islands do not necessarily fit the whole information architecture that was well-designed and thoroughly structured when the website was initially designed. The consequence is a poor navigation scheme that is more irritating than helpful, because the content appears to be scattered all over the place instead of contained in separate, very distinct folders (in fact, this is a problem we encountered here at Smashing Magazine a couple of weeks ago).

When content organization appears to be a mess and it seems nearly impossible to find information, users are very unlikely to decide to browse the available sections of the website. They are more likely to either leave the website (hitting the “Back” button and returning to Google’s search results), or turn to the only escape hatch they (hopefully) have: the holy search box. ...

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http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/04/designing-the-holy-search-box-examples-and-best-practices/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/04/designing-the-holy-search-box-examples-and-best-practices/