Portfolio: DirectHit.com search site usability study

DirectHit.com needed an analysis of their new site design before launching it. In particular, they wanted me to test people's search strategies, and see how they reacted to the new shopping pages. Most significant result: Web users don't understand search and don't really want to.

The site now has more guidance for searching as a result of the usability study. They made a lot of small changes that add up to greater usability.

Offer better search tips. Search tips are important because we learned how little people understood searching. It's not important that people learn search in detail, so the site has to help people create good searches and recover when they don't find what they want.

The original site just had "Need help Searching?" as a help link. They changed the help text so it alternates among a series of help messages to provide some specific information.

Improved search tips

Explain important concepts. As with many sites, the concepts particular to DirectHit weren't explained clearly enough. The study identified some of these problems, which the development team changed.

The result page did not originally explain the little orange people icons, which indicate that many people found that page relevant. This is an important aspect of directhit.com, and the message was not getting across.

Related searches are more clearly indicated now, too. This is another important feature of their technology.

A detail from a result page

The search string is clearly shown in the results listing. The image above shows that the search string is displayed clearly in the result listings ("US constitutional law"). It was originally very small and hard to find. The change should make orientation and refining the search easier.

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