This week’s site search tips re-visit the topic of refinements. Refinements are an important aspect of site search because they make it significantly easier for visitors to sort through results to find what they’re looking for. We have many more tips on refinements (and other topics) in our free “Big Book of Site Search Tips” that can help you improve performance of your site search and deliver a better customer experience.
Next week will be our final post on the site search tips topic, so please be sure to download our free “Big Book” if you haven’t already!
- Consider storing some facet choices for users so they don’t have to make them each time – For example, on a shoe website, if someone selects women’s shoes and size 5, this information could be stored in a cookie and automatically selected next time they do a search. This is implicitly remembering their preferences; you could also let them explicitly state these preferences. If you’re not sure, try asking your customers.
- Consider having an advanced search page that allows the visitor to enter a keyword and preselect refinement options before they see results – Optionally, this can be configured as a gift finder. Consider configuring search so a visitor can only select combinations that actually return results. For example, you offer the option to refine products by color and by category. You offer a red iPod but no red TVs. So if visitors select the TV category, then the ability to restrict the search to red products should no longer be available.
- Offer the ability to refine by price for a product search – Price is an important part of a buying decision. Normally price refinements are shown as a list of ranges. One nice option to consider is a price slider, which allows you to set a bottom price and a top price easily. This is a nice presentation option because it takes less screen real estate than a list of price ranges and it offers more flexibility than fixed price ranges. It does, however, require more clicks.
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