User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am trying to define how a website search should be designers for a website that has products, articles, recipes and other general content pages.
The answer seems obvious, have a faceted result page for each content type. However, this seems too simple.
What questions should I ask to inform the solution further? or... how should I approach search design in general?
Thanks!
There are lots of different search patterns, where each suites a particular goal. Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender wrote a great book about them called Search Patterns - Design for Discovery http://searchpatterns.org
The design of search is a tricky business. Each project is unique.
For starters, we must select research methods that fit the context. Unobtrusive field observation is rarely practical, since search is generally ad hoc. But we can surely draw upon other ethnographic techniques, including interviews, questionnaires, and diary study.
You started by creating a design, i.e. The answer seems obvious, have a faceted result page for each content type, but surely you start by firstly understanding your users and discovering what they want to find.
So everything begins by understanding the find-ability goals of the user. I cannot tell you the questions you might need to ask because I don't know your context, but I imagine these might start you off:
Search is a multidisciplinary collaboration of design, engineering, marketing and management.
