Category: Usability

Improving Site Search With Rules, Analytics & Rich Auto Complete

by Patrick Altoft on October 1, 2009 / 3 responses

For major sites one of the most important features is a good search facility. Customers, especially non-savvy ones, use the search feature a lot and it’s vital that it offers a good user experience.

Since a lot of users type quite strange keywords into search engines it’s not really enough to rely on simple text matching any more for a search engine, you almost need to be trying to replicate Google technology combined with your product catalogue.

One of the trends this year has been rich autocomplete which is demonstrated nicely on the Apple site. Product images are pulled in dynamically as the user types a query in the search box.

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Creating Usable & High Converting Web Forms

by Patrick Altoft on September 30, 2009 / 3 responses

With shopping cart abandonment standing at over 50% it’s clear that creating user friendly forms is a very important part of ecommerce and online sales.

Forms are even more important on social networks where you have perhaps 10 seconds to convince somebody to sign up. The user registration processes on Twitter and Facebook have been refined and perfected to maximise conversion rates – notice how the “Signup” button on both sites are green which is the colour for “Go” and a good one for conversion rates.

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