It is a good idea to use a cta button on a search bar for an app?

Question

In our company we’re creating an app about apply for jobs. Its main features and functionalities are: search all kind of jobs, list of results, and of course apply among other things.

The home page is composed by a search bar with the following items:

1. A text field where users could type occupations or jobs.
2. A second text field where users could type a city.

As an internal requirement, users could perform the search if they type both: occupation and city.

Wireframe:

But the project team has been thinking if it’s a good idea to put a “search” cta:

Or let users use the enter key from the keyboard.

What would you recomend? Is it a good practice to put a cta in the search bar?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Below is my recommendation based on my experience working with a similar search.

First and foremost I would provide a search CTA which also works with the enter key. There is no point in making the user guess how to run a search, I would make it very obvious by providing a search CTA to execute a search.

It makes even more sense to add a search CTA as you have multiple criteria the user can fill in before you can execute a search and there is no guarantee which control would the user choose to fill first and which one will the user fill in last.

Also as these are typeahead control the user might want to execute a search by just typing a string of text and never picking a value from either of the typeahead.

I have detailed the various scenarios that you may encounter during your implementation.

1. Occupation picked from TA and nothing in the city
2. Occupation picked from TA and city is a string not a value from TA
3. Occupation picked from TA and city picked from TA
4. Occupation String entered and no value from TA and nothing in the city
5. Occupation String entered and no value from TA and city is a string not a value from TA
6. Occupation String entered and the city picked from TA
7. nothing in Occupation and nothing in the city
8. nothing in Occupation and city is a string not a value from TA
9. nothing in occupation and city picked from TA

Again this might be a good candidate to test with your users to capture in analytics if the search was executed using the CTA click or using the enter key. Once you know the results, it might answer the question for you for the future.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Agreed with the project team. Having the search button makes it clearer that an action is going to be performed. The keyboard enter key option should also be there, but only as an alternative to the search button, not as a replacement.