E-commerce Usability – Refined Searches
As previously explained, as site search function is a must for any e-commerce website as it allows users to find what they’re looking for. However it is not unusual to be flooded by a huge number of search results in such an instance, so an option to narrow the criteria of a search is a very useful tool. If you searched for ‘Lord of the Rings: Return of the king’, you’ll no doubt be given results from CD, DVD and Video Games which match the search keywords. Narrowing it to a search within ‘CD’ would ensure only the soundtrack would appear from the search.
I think Zavvi has it right. It’s not too complicated either. You don’t want a hug list of categories to navigate through, just the main ones which will really help in narrowing down your search.
January 15th, 2009
Good points, think you meant huge not hug though? I had the opposite problem with one of my sites where I had written the search feature in php. To begin with searches for ‘widget’ would not return results for ‘widgets’, by adding some code for plurals I could provide better search returns.