Should search display results by default or should users land on an empty page?

Question

We are currently redesigning employee search for a web app and we are debating whether the search page should display some employee records by default or not.

In my opinion displaying a portion of the results provides more context when users are formulating their query and provides an opportunity to offers users valuable data that they can use upfront to take bulk actions. The solution proposed also includes feedback to users in terms of number of results found and employee list is updated dynamically to reflect user query.

On the other hand, backend developers seem very reluctant to display results by default, their rationale is that there is no need to return 70 000 records when your are just searching for a single user, hence my question.

what would be the best approach to implement search results page in this context?

Answer 1

Unlike B2C shopping sites where you can display a list of popular items or new promotions, there is nothing useful that you can display when it comes to finding employees, so a simple search field would suffice. You might also want to consider including a department filter if it help the user to narrow down the search criteria (assuming your data model supports this).

I have seen many enterprise class software which initially shows all users sorted alphabetically together with pagination, but this never supports the users goal of finding a specific user, and the user would never be interested in the first page of employees just because their names start with A.

So keep this simple and your users will love the simplicity of the solution.

Answer 2

Here's a different idea, what about a department list?

Just brainstorming in terms of what people might be doing when it comes to looking at a list of employees. If I know the name of the person I'm looking for, I'll directly search for that. I'm guessing the 2nd most common case would probably be "I know the person is in XYZ department".

Instead of hunting through the filter or search parameters section to find department, show them a listing of the departments. That'll allow them to drill down reasonably quickly to find the staff they're looking for.

This might work better if you have a limited set of departments as oppose to 100s.

Answer 3

The rule in ecommerce is to NEVER return an empty page after search. Show similar items or when the search query is to incoherent, show popular items or items on sale.

But you're asking about default.
If there's room you could show something. Recent searches would be a good one. Facebook displays those if you linger in the search box for a few seconds. I can't really come up with anything else you might want to display by default.
Or you might want to go the Google way and just show the search box. Clean and simple.

What you show after the search query is more important to my opinion. How do you handle zero results. People might not remember a persons name exactly. Display names that are similar. Or when one result is returned, because the search query was very exact, show similar persons (same department or same function).

In my experience backend developers always show a lot of reluctance. Not meaning this as an insult, but BE developers are lazy in that context. I've had a hard time convincing the BE developers to spend the extra time into the result page to always show relevant items when there are zero results. Why spend that much time when not displaying anything was fine too? My argument was why settle with fine or good when you can have better. These UX arguments are lost to some of them and in my case all of those I had to work with.

Answer 4

In terms of a users experience whatever is fastest will be best. If you can get all records on the page and search them in the memory of the browser faster than you can send a search request over the wire that will be the better way of doing it.

Unless you can know why people would be searching the employee records in some way I don't think you can possibly offer a selection of "default" people. Maybe you could see if that's some research that could be done? Perhaps if you have a link from an internal article by the internal compliance team to the search for people page then you might consider preloading the internal compliance team, but other links might not be obvious.

You mention that you want to hint to the users about what they could search for, maybe the space would be better used by explicitly stating how they could find people? Rather than showing a record and assuming a user will know you can search on anything shown.

Also you might want to consider by whom each characterisitc can be searched on, people might be concerned that anyone could search for the names of under 21 year old females with a social media account as an example.

Answer 5

In our program we showed an empty list with a message saying something like "Select your criteria and click Search."and users hated it. Apparently some were thinking that there were no employees in the list. We end up showing the first page (10 records) of the unfiltered list.

I personally like the idea of showing the most recently "used" records. Meaning that if I click in an employee in the list to see details, etc, the next time I go to the list I'll see those employees recently used. The problem is that it doesn't always makes sense and it needs some extra work.