Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success

CHAPTER 1

STARTING FROM ZERO: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages

The No Search Results Page: Your Key to Competitive Search Advantage PAGE 4

Create a Robust Partial Match Strategy PAGE 11

Employ Multiple Content Strategies PAGE 15

Case Study: Hotmail No Search Results Page PAGE 17

How Can Your Site-Search Analytics Help You, by Louis Rosenfeld PAGE 19

Search, more than any other activity, is a living, evolving process of discovery—a conversation between a customer and the Web site. Unfortunately, this conversation is often fraught with miscommunication, and so it is critical for you to keep this conversation going even when the customer has initiated a search that yielded no results.

Unfortunately, the typical product team has no coherent strategy for cases when there are no search results, generally treating such occurrences as a “user error.” Most teams spend the bulk of their design phase working on the search results pages for a successful search. Then in the harried moments prior to launch, the engineers hurriedly slap something together for the no search results page. Such an approach is detrimental to the success of a customer's search experience.

In my experience, the effort and ingenuity a product team invests in the no search results page is indicative of its overall dedication to customer success. Ignoring this special kind of search results page virtually guarantees a mediocre search experience and contributes to obscurity in the ecommerce marketplace. On ...