nice details on search UI
November 15, 2011 - 15:56 — Ruidai
In "Search User Interfaces", Hearst suggested the guideline of "Suggest the Search Action in the Entry Form", which is intended to "reduce short-term memory load" by providing the user suggestions in the search UI. In Hearst's article an example of a search box with greyed-out text that read "Search My Saved Pages" was given.
Recently I spent some time with Wolfram Alpha and saw some interesting "suggestions" that the UI offered. The landing page of the website is still very typical - the universal search box and a search button placed on its left. But when you click on the search box, a floating list appears and shows examples of the terms one could search with the site. On top of the search box, there is also Examples and Random. Click on Examples and you are brought to a new page of subject areas. Click on Random and a random search phrase is entered into the search box.
The Walfram search engine is not quite analogous to Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and I personally found the suggestions very helpful in understanding the engine's functionalities and capabilities.
Another site that I found have been creative in the area of search UI is hipmunk.com, a flight search website. Not only are the flight durations visualized, there is a sorting function that is new: Agony. Mouse over and the system explains: Agony is a combination of price, duration, and number of stops. This corresponds another guideline of Hearst: "Allow Sorting of Results by Various Criteria". However, traditionally the criteria are simply attributes of the items listed, but hipmunk.com is creative in that it introduced a derived criterion based on others.
Some screenshots are attached.
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