Arguably, website design hasn’t been in form for quite a while. An overabundance of ads has stuffed the cat and dog pictures beneath the newest mattress. Pop-ups have returned, too, often as newsletter invitations or competition invites. It’s all in the name of customer retention – somewhat ironically.
On-site search
A website is one of the main entry points for visitors, so it shouldn’t push them away, but getting people through the initial marketing is only one of several hurdles on the customer journey. What if they can’t find what they want once they’re in?
On-site search is an overlooked part of website design, especially for sites that cater to people with distinct tastes, like entertainment genres. Online gaming is sortable by theme, complexity, features, historical period, and lots of other topics.
The slots at Paddy Power Games have been updated with new search functionality, which provides suggestions of terms to look for. Themes (animal, fruits, or mythological), or features like free spins and jackpots, can be filtered until players find what they like.
This update might seem insignificant, but research from Google Cloud indicates that 85% of online consumers will change their opinion of a company if they have poor search tools. Half of those (52%) will take their business elsewhere.
The same source reports that a positive search experience correlates with more purchases (69% of shoppers), while 99% of customers said they’d make a return visit. Google claims the US shopping giant Macy’s increased conversion by 2% with a more efficient site search.
Searching behaviours
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for site search, its importance grows the more content a business needs to provide. Directories, including sites like TripAdvisor and JustEat, live and die on the quality of their search engines.
The marketing company SearchStax recommends everything up to basic word processing for a site search – autocomplete, synonym and misspelling recognition, and the ability to recognise whether the user is on mobile or desktop.
Forbes claims a website has just 54 seconds to give visitors what they want, which makes a strong site search a webmaster’s best friend. Supporting this is the fact that online shoppers aren’t prone to window shopping. More than half of them seek out the search bar first, according to research from Forrester.
So, what’s a designer to do? Searching behaviours don’t have to be complicated. In fact, the Baymard Institute claims that there are only four personalities when it comes to hunting down products. These are exact searchers, product-type searchers, problem-based searchers, and those who ask general business questions.
Put another way, people generally know what they want when they start searching. An exact searcher might aim for (e.g.) a TV by brand and model, while a product-type searcher is interested in the entire TV section. Problem-based searchers are those who want a TV with an HDMI socket. Either way, we’ve got three people looking for a TV.
Having a search that’s sophisticated enough to serve all three people is what keeps them on the journey to the checkout.
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