The Solution

EK facilitated a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups with subject matter experts, content creators, and technical partners to define the current and target state of the retailer’s Content Management maturity using EK’s proprietary 50-factor Content Management Benchmark. EK then partnered with the learning team to define a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM Platform design to help the learning team improve their Content Management maturity over a multi-year period using a phased approach. The KM Platform design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies, including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. These technical recommendations have resulted in the creation of a digital library that is currently helping the retailer to more effectively and efficiently manage the sheer scale of content in their learning ecosystem, increase the organization’s speed in creating learning content, and decrease the time it takes associates to find and discover lessons.

The EK Difference

EK leveraged its unique, 50-factor benchmark to develop a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s Content Management maturity and define a future state for the retailer to work towards. EK also utilized its thorough understanding of the client’s culture and processes to produce a Content Management Strategy and Roadmap for implementation using an iterative, Agile approach, and leveraged in-house technical expertise to recommend a unique set of technological solutions aimed at alleviating the inefficiencies the client was experiencing. 

The EK team was uniquely positioned to deliver expertise in learning solutions because of our extensive experience delivering KM training sessions, workshops, and materials to a variety of clients as well as our in-house team of instructional designers and learning technology experts. We have conducted dozens of similar efforts with organizations like this one, and the EK team was equipped to deliver both hands-on training and in-depth technical support. This enabled us to holistically understand this organization’s needs and develop a strategy to help the learning team find the learning content and training materials they needed to support the organization’s employees. The EK team also demonstrated effective knowledge transfer techniques that the learning team could then utilize within their own training efforts. 

EK is also skilled in bridging the gaps between strategy, design, and implementation, as this effort fused personal interaction with stakeholders to develop a content management strategy with targeted, technical recommendations to plan and implement a KM Platform design. Rather than evaluating just the current state of the organization and developing a strategy to address current challenges, the EK team worked with stakeholders to determine the organization’s long-term goals and recommended various technologies that would help the organization update and maintain its learning content in the future.   

The Results

The retailer and EK’s long-standing partnership allowed them to successfully design, develop, and deploy three major releases for the digital library into the retailer’s production environment, resulting in increased time savings and reduced costs related to developing learning content, as well as a workforce with the necessary skills and expertise to do their jobs effectively and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The retailer was able to gain an improved visibility into each associate’s capabilities and an enhanced ability to identify gaps in their learning content, resulting in more targeted learning experiences to upskill employees and guide their professional development. Additionally, the renewed consistency, reuse, and findability of learning materials allowed the retailer to mitigate any repercussions associated with on-site store safety, diversity and inclusion, and employee and customer health and wellbeing.

The post Content Management Strategy for an International Retailer appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

EK performed initial user and system research and analysis to identify issues and recommend solutions to improve overall UX. As part of this research, EK facilitated cross-departmental focus groups and workshops with stakeholders and SMEs, in addition to conducting a current and target state analysis. During these activities, EK identified strengths and challenges in multiple aspects of the content lifecycle, from authoring and publishing to end-user content engagement. The challenges identified in the analysis provided an opportunity to identify and prioritize relevant use cases, which helped shape the Agile product roadmap and EK’s tool recommendations. Additionally, the analysis enabled EK to identify user goals and evaluation criteria that could be measured to test solution effectiveness. The EK team also collaborated with taxonomy SMEs to review and improve the existing content metadata, providing the foundations for more granular content tagging. EK then developed an Agile product roadmap that incorporated our UX and system recommendations with iterative milestones and collaborated with the client company on implementing the multi-workstream roadmap to ensure the client company met its goals and improved solution effectiveness.

EK’s user and system research found a cycle of challenges that reduced user confidence in the client’s documentation hub.

The EK Difference

The EK team leveraged our experience with taxonomy design, ontology design, UX best practices, and enterprise search to design an Agile roadmap to achieve expanded search capabilities, governance workflows, and more personalized content experiences. Our certified taxonomists and ontologists collaborated with client company SMEs to capture and translate existing metadata and authoring processes into an expanded taxonomy that the CCMS could leverage for granular content tagging. EK’s expert taxonomy and ontology designers discerned metadata pain points to design and deliver data models that would support the client company’s current and future advanced user-driven use cases. EK also leveraged our knowledge graph experience to implement and query the data models created by the ontology designers to support the prioritized use cases surfaced from our initial research and analysis. The EK team leveraged our advanced content management, search, and knowledge management solution architecture experience to design a new system architecture that enables dynamic content assembly, improves search experience, provides personalized content to system users, and decreases manual authoring time spent creating the content.

The Results

EK delivered a state-of-the-art solution architecture that enables increased granular tagging of componentized content for improved content and metadata management, content reuse across multiple end-user content experiences, and a streamlined content authoring process. The focus groups that EK conducted enabled the EK team to include and inform multiple departments across the organization, facilitating future cross-department collaboration. After applying the content changes, EK worked with the client to reevaluate user feedback on the site and found that

• Users were more satisfied with the content experience,
• Users were much more accurate with their answers, and
• Users were able to find answers in almost half the time.

The bench-marked structured Agile roadmap will enable the team to socialize the architecture and governance changes within the organization, communicating and promoting momentum and buy-in for the architecture and governance implementation.

The post User-Centric Content Engineering to Improve Customer Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

This infographic is a visual introduction to how facets can improve item, document, and content findability, regardless of the form and structure of that content. Other factors, like customized action-oriented results and an enterprise-wide taxonomy, allow for an even more advanced search experience. EK has experience in designing and implementing solutions that optimize the way you use your knowledge, data, and information, and can produce actionable and personalized recommendations for you. If this is something you’d like to speak with the experts at EK about, reach out to info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Using Facets to Find Unstructured Content appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Moreville’s User Experience Honeycomb advanced the conversation from just discussing usability and gave designers of web products a more complete tool for strategically analyzing and improving the overall experiencing of interacting with web products. With this increase in completeness came an increase in the complexity of the analysis and discussion. As we decide which facets of the UX honeycomb to prioritize in our product development, accessibility often gets a lower priority than the others (unless we’re developing products for the Federal government). Accessibility is ranked towards the bottom of the UX honeycomb at our peril, however. As discussed below, designing an accessible web product cannot be separated from the other aspects of user experience.

Accessible

IT Accessibility simply means that our web products and content must be accessible to anyone – regardless of disability. In an analysis of the intersection between accessibility and user experience it is important to acknowledge the obvious fact that accessibility is one Moreville’s facets of user experience. If someone is blind and requires the use of screen readers to access the content on our websites, their user experience is going to be poor if we haven’t built an accessible product. But the strategies we employ to ensure our web products and web content are accessible ultimately impact other aspects of user experience beyond the “accessible” facet of the honeycomb.

Findable

One of the core services of Enterprise Knowledge is knowledge management strategy and design, so creating findable content is near and dear to our hearts. One of the key ways we ensure content is findable (sometimes via keyword search, and sometimes via faceted navigation) is through metadata. 508 compliance requires key metadata be associated with any web content. At minimum, this should include:

• Title
• Author
• Subject
• Keyword(s)

If you’re creating content directly in a CMS, this will often be accomplished by “tagging” content (i.e. this blog post is tagged to topic/subject = “Content and Brand Strategy” on the EK website). If you’re creating a document like a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF that will be uploaded to a document management system, you can add the metadata under File > Info > Properties. Adding this information to your web content will simultaneously improve the findability and the accessibility.

Valuable

Take a moment and think about the product value statement for any product you’re developing. Is it:

• To improve employee performance through improved access to learning resources?
• To provide an enticing view of goods and services for sale and encourage consumers to purchase them?
• To raise awareness about the mission of a philanthropic organization?

I challenge you to think of any product value statement where accessible features and content would not enhance your ability to realize that value. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States have a disability. This is not a small market segment – you can’t afford to leave them out.

Useful

As designers of web products we must always be confident and creative enough to challenge assumptions and ask whether the products we’re creating are actually of some use. Web products that are not accessible are inherently less useful. As professionals, we shouldn’t let managers or clients push us to design and build less useful products – it’s not in anyone’s best business interests.

Usable

Often when we talk about user experience, the conversation focuses on ease-of-use (usableness). While making our products more accessible can make human-computer interactions more complicated, a well-designed, accessible system can understand enough about the user to personalize the experience and offer the least-restrictive option to meet that user’s accessibility needs. Barring the level of complexity (or budget) for an automatically personalized user experience, we can allow users to self-select the level of accessibility and assistance that is required. For example, not everyone needs an audio-described version of a video or a companion video transcript, but offering an option to our users can only improve the usability of our products

Desirable

The principles of emotional design (focusing on how a user feels when interacting with a product) can help us use improved accessibility to design desirable web products. Research tells us that we can affect the desirableness of a product through three key strategies:

• Visceral emotional design – Here we design for aesthetic pleasure. When we factor in aspects of accessible product design like adequate contrast ratio, we are improving the visceral emotional design of the product.
• Behavioral emotional design – Here we focus on how well the product performs the desired functions. There’s a lot of overlap between behavioral emotional design and designing a usable product (discussed above).
• Reflective emotional design – In reflective emotional design, we help our product’s users understand the product’s impact on their lives – even when they’re not actively using it. To design for this we really have to understand our users and think about how we want them to feel when they use the product. It’s the most complex of the three tiers of emotional design, but again – improving accessibility, while not compromising style and simplicity, can only improve the emotions users associated with our products.

Credible

Stanford’s Web Credibility Research has resulted in this top 10 list to boost your website’s credibility. It seems pretty credible – supporting research and all. While accessibility is not directly mentioned, a site that is easy to use – and useful (number 7 on the list) repeats two elements of the user experience honeycomb discussed above. In short, good design is good design and a well-designed product improves accessibility, credibility, and overall user experience.

Summary

When designing web products – and creating the content which fills those products – it’s easy to think that the technical experts and leadership within an organization know what’s best. It’s important, however, to prioritize the needs of the system’s users, even if those needs contradict what we think we know. The tension between leadership’s desires and users’ needs already lends a layer of complexity to product design and content creation, and it’s easy for accessibility concerns to get squeezed out by that tension. EK’s consultants can help you balance the tension of these conflicting needs when designing your product and crafting content. Contact us to learn more.

The post The Intersection of User Experience and Accessibility appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As product creators, we should make decisions based on feedback from people who consistently interact with the product, rather than our own priorities and preferences. You may have spent time painstakingly developing multiple end-user personas for both inside or outside your organization. Now that the personas have been developed, it is important to make sure that you consistently weave them throughout your development process to create a great solution for your end user.

Deriving Epics from Personas

Once you have created your product-specific personas, it is now time to take their goals and drill them down into epics. At EK we define an epic as:

Example Epic

Let’s use the following example to demonstrate how a user persona can guide the story writing process:

University-Wide Initiative: Improve the findability of information and experts that students need in order to enhance their learning experience at EK University

User Persona:

Jane’s persona represents one of many students on EK University’s campus that have the same or similar problem. Based on Jane’s goals and frustrations, a digital tool that increases her social engagement and peer collaboration may be created in order to ensure her success because it connects her to other students on the same learning path.

A sample epic may be:

As an active student, I would like a responsive and robust mobile app, so I can engage and collaborate with the other students learning about KM in my class, in real time.

In her persona, Jane is clearly motivated by technology. Her motivation is incorporated into the epic as an app that can be viewed and easily used on her phone. Notice that the epic is high-level yet captures Jane’s goal of being successful in engaging and collaborating with her fellow peers around increasing shared knowledge, quickly and efficiently. Creating a persona-driven epic allows us to center ourselves around the user experience, one where the overarching focus is framed around the user and their needs.

Writing User Stories with Personas

Having developed an epic based on Jane’s persona, you can now break the epic into smaller user stories. Remember that the user stories should be written as problem statements in the perspective of the person who has an issue or challenge; in this case, Jane. So, if you don’t know who the users are and what problem you want to solve then it’s impossible to write the right stories and you end up with a wish list rather than a description of the relevant product functionality. At EK, we describe user stories as:

Example User Stories

Going back to our epic of “develop a mobile app for active students,” we can now break it down to include the following hypothetical user stories:

Sample user stories may be:

As a student…

• I would like to have a tool where I can chat with the peers in my class, in real time, so that I can collaborate on projects and share knowledge
• I would like a space where all relevant course materials are stored for easy access, so that I can quickly get all my documents
• I would like to see my course grades, so that I can quickly check my progress.
• I would like to quickly send and receive emails to and from my peers and from the app, so that I can quickly engage with them about a class.

In her persona, Jane is frustrated by not being able to access class documents easily  and is driven by her goals and motivations surrounding creating positive peer relationships and having goals to maintain at least a 3.5 GPA. Here, using a persona to derive user stories was effective because the user stories were written in a way that identifies the direct user (Jane) and explains what she needs and why she will need it. Using a defined persona allowed us to create a holistic user story centered around Jane and her peers, rather than just a product.

In Conclusion

In order to design an exceptional product, one that is directly related to your end users, you have to understand and utilize your user personas throughout the sprint process. While completing these may seem a bit time-consuming, completing both will serve as the basis for product success and can potentially save you from any major re-designs in the future. One way to keep your epics and user stories centered around your personas, is by keeping hard copies posted on the wall. This way, you will always have a visual reminder of who you are building your product for. If you’re interested in developing personas or successfully applying personas to your product, contact Enterprise Knowledge at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Personas to Products: Writing Persona-Driven Epics and User Stories appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The post Validation Techniques to Enhance Usability appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

A few months ago, my colleague wrote an excellent blog about

While this may seem like a straightforward concept, designing for and collaborating with your users is often much more difficult in practice. How do you ensure that your collaboration efforts with users are not only meaningful, but structured enough to be both productive and actionable? This is a challenge we encounter time and time again. Below, I describe several strategies and best practices for eliciting ongoing feedback and co-designing solutions with your core users.

Adopt the Right Mindset

It’s essential that your team members embrace a collective mindset around collaboration and what that can and should entail. Here are some characteristics that are absolutely essential for a team to adopt for effective collaboration:

1. Don’t let egos stand in the way of success – Innovation can come from anyone, especially your users. Be humble, and listen without preconceived notions of what the solution is.
2. Empathy is the basis for success – Empathy allows your team to develop solutions that are both innovative and responsive to real users’ needs and desires. Empathy also helps teammates respect each other’s perspectives and communicate well.
3. Be agile – At EK, when we talk about agile, we say that you don’t do agile, you become agile. Agile carries over into UX constantly, because during your collaborative efforts, you’ll never have all the answers. Embrace the uncertainty and be willing to implement designs in an agile way; in an iterative manner and without knowing all the details and requirements.

Set Expectations from the Start

Your first conversation with end users is absolutely critical for setting a tone that is friendly and open to carry through the duration of the project. Whenever you begin an initiative with end users, engage them in conversations as soon as possible to gather their ideas, challenges, and situations. Doing this results in two key benefits. First, you immediately start gathering critical data and anecdotes to inform your future designs. Second (and more importantly), these conversations build trust with end users, thereby strengthening the understanding that you are working together to address the challenge, which will better ensure engagement, buy-in, and overall adoption down the road. Set expectations about the project, be honest about potential obstacles, and transparent about your processes. Doing so will further build trust and rapport with your users.

Select the Right Approach

There’s never a “one size fits all” approach to user collaboration, so it’s essential for your team to engage users in ways that make them comfortable with contributing. The more comfortable users are, the more likely they are to offer candid, authentic information and feedback, which leads to deeper and more nuanced understandings.

At a high level, here are some guiding questions to help you determine what collaboration approach to use with your users:

1. How often do your users want to hear from you? Every day, week, or only at critical points in the project?
2. How do your users currently communicate and collaborate? Do they prefer more structure and formality, or less?
3. What is the problem or challenge that needs to be collaboratively solved?
4. What results ideally need to be produced as a result of collaborating?

Every situation necessitates a different method, and in some instances, you may combine several collaboration approaches to achieve your end goal. It’s critical to consider the ideal outcome for your collaboration efforts, as this will inevitably shape the format for the exercise. For instance, maybe your team has to gather as many ideas for potential solutions as possible.  A timeboxed brainstorming session where participants are encouraged to write and sketch as many ideas as possible would be a potential fit. In another example, perhaps your team has a slew of potential features for an app and needs a clear direction for moving forward. Here, it makes more sense to collaborate around “sense-making” – grouping and categorizing ideas into themes, with a dot voting exercise to prioritize.

Add Focus and Structure

We’ve all been in meetings that lack clear objectives and direction, and we recognize that it’s frustrating to participate in seemingly aimless conversations. Therefore, it’s essential, especially when collaborating with your users, to create structure in order to ensure progress.

When people hear the word “structure,” many equate it to “rules,” which sounds counterintuitive to collaboration. However, without these parameters, it’s inevitable that group politics and policies will drive the conversations, limiting the group’s potential. To that end, planned collaborations need to balance a range of communication styles and preferences, as well as group interactions. To start, work as a group to collectively define ground rules facilitate good collaborative behavior. Be sure to establish timeboxes to help participants avoid getting stuck, and utilize an array of activities to engage both introverts and extroverts. For example, having individuals participate in a silent brainstorming session followed by report-outs will ensure everyone has a format that is more comfortable for them, and that they each have a voice. In some scenarios it is also helpful to assign roles of note-takers, facilitators, etc. to participants so that everyone feels they have a purpose.

Closing

Collaboration may sound simple, but it’s much more difficult to effectively practice, especially when you and your team are often dealing with a wide range of users, all with varying objectives, needs, and expectations. Despite these challenges, the value of collaborating with your users is clear. When you design with your users, you ensure your team understands the whole picture, and builds out products and solutions that are not only usable, but delightful.

Interested in learning how to more effectively collaborate with your end users? Contact us, we’re happy to help!

The post Collaboration for Improved User Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

• The differences between findability and discoverability;
• Why they’re equally important; and
• How they manifest in successful KM initiatives.

Findability v. Discoverability: What’s the Difference?

Findability is a term for the ease with which information can be found. It means that users can easily find content or information they assume is present on a website. As an example, if I’m looking on EK’s website for information about Agile Transformations, I can search for a specific term (agile transformation), and find information about the topic.

However, users rarely know all of the content on your website. A good knowledge management strategy also promotes discoverability, which involves making sure that new content or information can be found, even if the user(s) don’t know that it exists yet.

Let’s say that after clicking on and reading through the first search result (“Why Agile Fails When Organizations Try to ‘Go Agile’”), I’ve realized that, while this content addresses my initial search, I’d like to find out more.

In the image above, the right hand side of the page has lists of “Related Content” and “Related News”, which enable me as a user to further explore and discover other content that’s, for instance, about the same core topics, by the same author, or of the same type.

Findability and Discoverability for Improved User Experience

Findability and discoverability are important because they address two distinct needs of end users searching for the content they need. A user’s informational needs are not satisfied solely through finding content that they know exists, or exclusively through discovering information that they hadn’t known about previously. A user’s goals constantly change between finding specific information and discovering new information, and any well-thought-out KM strategy needs to accommodate both.

The findability/discoverability challenge is even more critical when considering intranets, knowledge bases, and other internal content/document management systems, where users may need to wade through thousands of documents to find what they’re seeking. Below are three ways that findability and discoverability manifest in KM initiatives.

Well-Designed Main Navigation

Helping your users navigate efficiently should always be a high priority. Simply relying on keyword search will not be enough. A well-designed and prominent main navigation menu acts as a map that directs your end users to the information they’re seeking. Here are several tips that will help ensure that your navigation menu is easily findable for end users:

• Keep it simple. Strip down your navigation menu to the bare minimum and keep only the menu items which direct users to the most sought-after content on your site.

• Give your main navigation menu the visual weight it deserves. Consider font and icon size, and the color contrast (especially as it relates to links within your navigation).
• Consider responsive design. Users increasingly access web content on mobile devices rather than on a desktop monitor. It’s essential to consider how your menu will look on a tablet, and a smartphone. Less screen space means less content, so be purposeful in deciding what information people really need to see in your navigation menu.

Facted Navigation

Faceted navigation is something that sounds complex, but is easy to recognize in practice. Faceted navigation means picking the facets (or filters) that a user will utilize to choose their own search path. For example, if I wanted to buy a pair of shoes, some facets that I would like to use to filter my search results could include shoe size, color, and heel height.

Determining what values to use as filters for your organization’s content can be tricky, because every organization has unique needs and situations which shape how their information should be organized. Through our business taxonomy design workshops, we help organizations to identify and prioritize these facets.

Related Content

Too often, websites miss opportunities to further engage their end users beyond their first click online. However, this isn’t necessarily due to the quality of your content, but rather the discoverability of your content.

One way to improve your content’s discoverability is by offering relevant links to content that is related to the original inquiry. While this process may seem straightforward, there are several tips to consider:

• Keep it simple. Simplicity reigns once again. It’s impossible to be completely accurate when deciding which links to share as related content, so it can be tempting to provide more to address all possibilities. This can easily overwhelm the end user, so cap the related links at five to seven.
• The level of specificity of related links depends on where the user is within the site. Offer a broader range of suggestions for posts on main pages, because they act as a bridge to content that end users may not have considered yet. On a topic-specific landing page, offer only related links which are relevant to that topic.
• Don’t disregard visual design. Typically, websites reserve the right side of a webpage for less important information (e.g., advertisements). As a result, it’s critical to avoid any visual elements similar to advertisements when designing your related content, because content is more likely to be ignored in that format.

Closing

Findability and discoverability are key outcomes for any comprehensive KM strategy, but improving both begins with keeping your users and their needs at the center of your efforts. In turn, you’ll ensure that your organization’s information is findable, manageable, and reusable for those who need it. Need help improving the findability and discoverability of your content? Contact Enterprise Knowledge to learn more.

The post Findability v. Discoverability appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As discussed in Part 1 of this two-part series, search puts a heavier burden on the user than most website interactions. Users must locate your search form, enter a meaningful keyword, and sift through pages of results in order to find the most relevant information. The look and feel of your search results page should make it as easy as possible for users to find the information for which they’re searching.

Should I Click on This?

The primary purpose of information in a list is to present users with enough information to decide if they want to read any more. Ask yourself, “What information do my users need to choose the right item in the list?” Make sure that information is included in the search results. No more. No less.

List v. Grid View

The most common page layouts for a search results page are a vertical list and a grid view. A list view is a good choice when the content is not highly visual (such as a list of documents) and when communicating the sort order clearly is a priority. Lists simply convey a sense a priority more clearly, with items at the top having a higher priority or relevance. This was the right solution for an international client for which EK recently designed a search results page.

A grid view is often the best decision for e-commerce sites and other search results for which users would appreciate the ability to scan highly visible content. Etsy provides a great example of this visually appealing search results layout.

Even Google, from which users expect a vertical list, will sometimes present search results more visually if that view will be of benefit to users. This search results page uses a combination of the list and grid page layouts.

Is This What You Meant?

Users will often enter vague search terms which could mean multiple things. Prompting users to clarify ambiguous search terms can greatly improve their satisfaction with search results. Wikipedia does this well through its disambiguation pages. If a user enters a search term which may have multiple meanings, he or she is taken to the page of the most likely search result, but similar results are clearly displayed.

If you think about it, disambiguation is just a fancy way of faceting your search results. In this example, the faceted navigation would allow users who entered the ambiguous search term “water” to clarify: did you mean water for hand washing or water for solid waste management?

Make it Easy to Click the Selected Result

Once your user has entered the search term, filtered the list, and found the ideal result in the list, it’s really frustrating if they try to click on it and have trouble. At minimum, the title and an additional link should click through to the selected content when clicked. If you’re using a more visual grid layout, the entire square should click through to the selected content, including the image.

Summary

User-centered design principles are really important when it comes to a search results page.  Just like a well-designed search results page, the first item in this list is the most important, so let’s review it again. “The primary purpose of information in a list is to present users with enough information to decide if they want to read any more.”

Do you need some help applying user-centered design and identifying the specific information your users need? Contact us at EK. We can help!

The post Search UX Best Practices Part 2: Search Results appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, Rebecca Wyatt, Senior Consultant at EK, explains the best practices to make search forms as intuitive as they can possibly be for your users. In Part 2, we’ll follow up with UX design best practices for search results.

Make The Search Form Easy To Find

Most users will look for your search tools in the top right corner of the page. Keep your search bar in a predictable location or make it very obvious on the page.  The example below is from a site EK built for an international client.

In addition to location, make sure the design of your search bar is highly visible on the page. Some designs hide the search bar, requiring users to click on the search icon to expose the form. This makes it harder for users to identify search tools and also requires more clicks before users can find what they’re looking for. The argument for this is that it presents a cleaner design, but the trade-off is not worth it.

Tell Users What To Type

There are lots of prompts you can add to your search bar. You can ask a question such as “Where would you like to go?” or a command such as “Find Recipes.” In this example, “Discover Connections” is a meaningful prompt to help users find professional connections by area of expertise.

Use Auto-Complete

As users are typing in keyword searches, you can reduce their keystrokes by enabling auto-complete. In addition to reducing keystrokes, it may also improve search results by suggesting accurate terms. A common example of this feature is when searching for flights. Users can begin typing a city and are prompted with a list of potential airports as in this example from Google Flights.

Filtering Search Results

After users enter a keyword in your site’s search box, they’re served up a list of results sorted “by relevance.” The logic which determines relevance is hidden from your user, and often, the content at the top of the list is not perceived as the most relevant to users. This gap between perceived relevance and actual relevance results in frustrated paging through search results – or even abandoned searches. Allowing your users to filter their search results allows them some control over what is most relevant and allows them to find their content faster. It also gives you more data about what users are actually searching for on your site, and helps you more accurately return a relevant list to your users over time.

The most familiar option for users to filter search is a series of checkboxes in the left column. This allows users to see most (if not all) of their filtering options on the screen at the same time as they are viewing search results. In addition to allowing users to filter their search results, filter labels provide information to users – promoting user discovery of content which they may not have known existed. EK uses this type of filtering in our own knowledge base.

There are some situations in which horizontal filter bars may be preferable to the left column list of filters. Mobile first designs may benefit from this treatment. Filter bars should be used with caution, however as they do require additional clicks to expose information to users and are therefore more difficult to navigate. Another caution: In many implementations, users can only expose one category of filter at a time – which is limiting.

Summary

Completing the search form, filtering search results, and selecting the most relevant content are some of the most demanding tasks which you’ll ask of your users. Employing these User Experience best practices will lessen this burden, setting your users up for success. These best practices are never black and white solutions, however. Always analyze your users’ goals and design your search tools accordingly. EK offers a search design workshop which will produce a set of recommendations to optimize your site’s search. Please contact us for more information.

The post Search UX Best Practices Part 1: User Input appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.