search tasks
philosophe.com A thoughtful approach to web site quality.
Essays in this search series:
Search is information retrieval, but neither term really helps when it comes to understanding what users of a commerce site are doing. Users want to find something. I think online shoppers are more interested in locating that special something than they are in using a search mechanism per se; search is simply a tool, and as a tool should be appropriate to the needs of the user and to the general task of finding stuff.
Users bring different expectations and goals with them when they approach a search. One of the keys to designing -- and evaluating the success of -- a site's search function is understanding what's going on in the user's head when they interact with search.
So, search is a tool for information retrieval, but the transaction of searching encompasses more than just looking something up. When designing and testing your site's search mechanism, you must consider the following issues:
Not all users approach search as a means of information retrieval; various studies show that some users employ search as a way to navigate within a web site. According to Jakob Nielsen,
Our usability studies show that more than half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behavior. The search-dominant users will usually go straight for the search button when they enter a website: they are not interested in looking around the site; they are task-focused and want to find specific information as fast as possible.
With most commerce sites centered around a product catalogue, this tendency to navigate via search makes it more difficult to design a search system that meets the needs of all shoppers.
Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville devote several sections in their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web to discussing the varying needs users bring to search. They mention four kinds of expectation (the following descriptions are liberally paraphrased from the book):
Users tend to search for products with a different in mind than when they search against document collections. When the user is in the mindset of "shopping", they usually are trying to accomplish any of a range of tasks; for example, with a scenario like shopping for a pair of khaki pants at an online clothing site, a user may have any (or several) of the following specific tasks:
These tasks generally aren't information related -- with the exception of that last one -- but rather are object related; that is, the user looks for a thing. Any meaning ascribed to the object is connotational. In contrast, information in a document collection is more denotational.
Any commerce site must study their customers and their market and develop a list of common user tasks. Users must be able to find products, and they must be able to follow paths appropriate to their own preferences.