But really, why read this eBook? Why spend time on moving your site’s search experience forward?

BAD SEARCH IS EXPENSIVE

It’s as simple as this: if the user can’t find what they are looking for, they will bounce and go to a competitor.

Users remember bad search experiences

While great search provides an impression of an overall smooth customer experience, bad search is far more memorable.

Great search produces business results

Which KPIs you are tracking depend on your vertical and your business, but across the board, improving your site’s search experience will improve your KPIs.

2. User intent: search beyond the box

At its essence, search is about harnessing the user’s intent and connecting it to the product users want to find. Users can indicate intent in many different ways: by typing directly into the search bar, leveraging filters and facets, or even clicking suggestions you provided because you know something about their preferences. Anything that the user directly tells or imparts to you is something that can be leveraged to ensure that what they are seeing and finding is relevant to them.

Covering the basics

Before considering advanced use cases, it is key to ensure that the basic elements of your search technology are in place. First and foremost: are the results coming to the user relevant to them?

There are several different aspects of relevance that are useful to differentiate between, and we’ll list them in order of importance:

• Textual Relevance
  • Typo-tolerance
  • Synonyms
  • Language-agnostic
  • Natural Language Processing
• Business Metrics
  • Conversion rates
  • Media views
  • Comment counts
  • ... and more
• Personalization
  • User behavior
  • User preference
  • Contextual awareness

TEXTUAL RELEVANCE

The name of a product, its brand, keywords in the description — what we call attributes — constitute textual relevance. Textual relevance means reading correctly into the user’s intent even if they misspelled a word or used a stop word (the, and, at, with...). It also means giving them a synonym result (offering a parka when they typed in “jacket”), and making sure that plurals are accounted for (searching for “feet warmers” should display foot warmers).

BUSINESS RELEVANCE

You can leverage your own business metrics to further impart relevance, ensuring that the user sees content they are most likely to act on. You could, for example, be tracking conversion rates on your products, and wanting to display first the result with the highest conversion rate.

PERSONALIZATION

Personalization is a proverbial cherry on top for stellar relevance, and it can be considered at a user level or at a group level. Let’s say a user is not logged in but you know they are in a certain age bracket or from a certain country — in that case, we are talking group level personalization. If they are in fact logged in, and you know their browsing or purchase history, you can take advantage of personalization at the user level.

Personalization is all about taking signals from your user: the conscious signals they are sending you by interacting with your user interface, and the more subconscious, latent signals coming from their past preference indications.

User experience: advanced use cases

There was a time when search was just a box for business users and customers: a box to check on your list of website elements, and a box for customers to enter queries into. This is no longer the case. Advanced technologies are raising the bar for customer experiences, which are not only becoming omnichannel, but multisensory, which leads to more complex development.

With this in mind, search technologies must offer users the most logical and most inspiring ways to get to the shopping cart. This means going past the standard usage of the search box. Here, we’ll look at examples to illustrate how search technology powers search experiences beyond the box.

MULTIPLE PATHS TO CONVERSION

Cratejoy is an ecommerce website that makes it easy for users to subscribe to boxes of products they’ll love. Their search experience is particularly interesting, because they leverage something we call multi-category autocomplete. Here, the user is searching within multiple content types at once, while having an autocomplete experience. This allows the user to indicate their content type preference by further diving into it.

For example, if a user types “planner” in the search box, they can instantly choose a subscription, a category, a collection related to planners — or, if none of that works, dive into a blog post. This is interesting because it offers the user multiple paths into different types of content, which translates into multiple paths to conversion, based on a user’s personal preferences and ways of processing information.

FACETS: FILTERS WITH SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE

WHAT EXACTLY ARE FACETS?

We are all familiar with filters as a way to narrow down our search result options. A facet is a filter that is intertwined with the result sets: the only facets that appear are the ones that match result sets. This prevents a “no result” type of screen experience, which almost universally causes users to bounce. If a user refines a search query for “dress” to “silk dress,” facets would show the categories available have decreased, showing only applicable facets. This means that in a few keystrokes and clicks, the user finds the very item they want. Compare this with a long list of items that comes with a standard search bar experience — by far superior.

LETTING THE USER DEFINE THE INTERFACE

An autocomplete overlay is what appears when the user types in a query and a new, large overlay window pops up, offering a chance for users to dive into additional facets via the “Show more” and “Show less” buttons, as well as a price range filter.

Another nice UX addition: letting the users toggle the view, indicating what is useful for them in terms of the interface itself.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Online stores can offer a multi-category autocomplete experience, but in a slightly different manner. They can not only show matching keywords, but also matching brands and matching categories as recommendations. In short, online stores can give users an easy way to drill down into what they really want.

DYNAMIC FACETING

Online stores can also deliver an advanced use case of dynamic faceting. When a user searches for “iPhone,” she gets applicable advanced facets, such as internal memory or screen sizes specific to iPhones — the “internal memory” facet might not be applicable to other products.

UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCE

One way to understand your audience is from the first click on the search bar without the user typing anything in at all. From there, you can reveal several suggestions, which can be pulled from the frequently asked questions from your support center (imagine a jeweler presenting “how to select your ring size?”). This is a great way to show understanding of customers’ desires and move them along their journey, while significantly reducing the number of support tickets.

Another innovative solution: allows the shopper to hide prices. In the case of jewelry, we can easily imagine a fatigued shopper enjoying this option because they don’t want to be swayed by the price, be it high or low.

FROM BEYOND THE BOX TO NO SEARCH BOX

Artsper, an arts buying and selling website, takes to heart the idea that search is not just about the search bar. Search technology rather powers the entire browse experience. If a customer selects a “painting” category on the home page, products and facets are showing up — even though no search query is entered.

Ecommerce businesses can also include recommended categories; a customer can easily dive into abstract paintings, for example — and that filter is just as easily removed. Why is this so interesting? No search bar query by the user is involved, even though the search technology behind the scenes takes care of the engaging and natural customer experience — including ranking and personalized recommendations.

3. Imagining possibilities

Our search experts built a faux ecommerce website to showcase what’s possible in the way of interesting user experiences. Our imaginary store is called Spencer & Williams. It primarily sells books, but also electronics, gifts, and office items. In this particular case, we chose to highlight the search bar on the home page as a way to draw the users in and give them a seamless, lightning-fast way to purchase. If a user searches for “Harry Potter,” the top result is only one click away from adding to the shopping cart.

The “Visit us” page is an interactive experience powered by our search engine, combined with Google Maps. Compare this with a plain text address and a static map.

The Contact page includes a search of frequently asked questions, significantly reducing those pesky support tickets.

4. Key takeaways

Search matters because it improves KPIs. Bad search is expensive not only because your users remember it but because they inevitably bounce from your site.

There are two key aspects to great search and discovery: relevance (including textual relevance, business relevance, and personalization) and user experience.

Advanced user experiences powered by search technologies go beyond the search box—they include powerful discovery through browsing, faceting, innovative UX buttons, and much more, shortening the user’s path to the shopping cart while driving your KPIs.

See how Algolia’s AI search solutions can boost your business.

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