| You cannot sell a product if your customers cannot find it. In our usability study of 20 big websites, our users had a success rate of only 64% in searching for - and finding - what they wanted. Given this low rate, Web designers and developers must treat the search function as a critical element of building a profitable website. The report contains a total of 29 design guidelines, based on usability testing of 20 big e-commerce sites with 64 users. When we analyzed 20 other big sites we found that the average site complied with 35% of these guidelines. In other words, the search on these sites violated 19 of the design guidelines on average. Smaller sites typically have even more usability mistakes in their search.
51 pages. Richly illustrated with 29 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable search design.
Even though a few of the design guidelines are specific to searching for products, most of the guidelines apply to all forms of Web searches, whether general websites or intranets.
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