I’ve been thinking about the search functionality for our online shop this week. I’ll write up our approach to search properly at a later date but for now I thought I share the variety of search forms I’ve seen on other online shops.
Some things of note:
- The longer search boxes were mostly on book sites.
- 3 sites also offered “suggestions as you type” (Amazon, Borders, Ocado)
- Only 1 site had an obvious link to an advanced search
- All sites handled scopes with a dropdown
(Visio stencil is from GUUUI)
Watch 24 Online | 08-Sep-09 at 8:45 pm | Permalink
Your observation is right. It is quite obvious that book stores need long boxes as most of the time the search string is comparably long.
Anyway can you suggest me a way to incorporate “suggestions” in the search as google and amazon.
Thanks
Wandtattoo | 11-Sep-09 at 9:06 am | Permalink
I think the best way is to use the shown version “guidance text in box” – it helps for faster search
Gonzalo González Mora | 26-Sep-09 at 1:09 am | Permalink
I’d be careful with the “guidance text in box” method. Although widely spread, I’ve read that some screen-readers can have a hard time with it. Also, users without JavaScript enabled (which sometimes are screen-reader users) would have to erase its content first in order to populate it.
One solution is to use JavaScript to both “pre-fill” and erase the default text. Patrick H. Lauke has made a function for this some while ago, which can be found here. I hope it helps.
PS: it’d be nice to have the “Gurken Subscribe to Comments” plug-in for WordPress; it can help to encourage the discussion
Karen | 03-Oct-09 at 10:27 am | Permalink
Agreed. Definitely have to treat the guidance text with a lot of caution where screenreaders are concerned. We generally just avoid it as there are other ways to provide the advice.
Suggestions as you type on the other hand is hard to provide an alternative to.