On Sep 16, 2008, at 12:09 PM, Kordian Piotr Klecha wrote:
Any suggestions will be welcome. I want to prepare some very general
usability design rules (with as little it-depends-factor as
possible), which will be apllied site-wide and used as a standard
for quite a long time, so it's very important for me to make proper
decisions and avoiding potential future problems.
There are some subtle differences between intranet and internet
search, which can drive your recommendations. However, in the search
work we've done, which covers large content sites, applications
(internal/external), and large sites which have a mix of content and
transactions/applications, we've found that large and centered in the
header performs best for the following reasons:
1. It's prominent and easy to spot
2. It's learned. People are used to it because they see it on Google
results, Yahoo!, and Comcast.net (a few large portals)
3. It's in the header area, which is where they tend to fall back on
for search
The second best place we've found is not in the top right corner, but
just below that. So, typically anchored at the bottom right corner of
the header (Facebook is a good example). People can still find it here
and will migrate to that area looking for it.
But if you want it to be a no-brainer and you have the real estate for
it, then top center of the page taking up about 50% of the header is
key.
Also, our research has shown that the length of the input field does
have some impact on searching. The shorter the field, the shorter the
search inputs (e.g. people put in fewer characters or words). With
longer input, it won't be unusual to see them type in entire sentences
or questions? There's a perception that the length of the search input
field dictates "How much I can type to search."
Cheers!
Todd Zaki Warfel
President, Design Researcher
Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully.
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