In a recent Design Review a client
remarked that Search functionality should be positioned on the right hand side. Their reasoning is that this is what other
ecommerce sites do.
Search will succeed on either side
providing the page is well-designed, so this remark gave me an interesting insight
in to the clients understanding of user-centric design.
In my early days as an Information
Architect there was more focus on design consistency and a commonly held naive
view that familiarity breeds usability. This
was like Designing-by-numbers.
Caution: Because everyone else is
doing something does not mean that it is right for your users. Humans
are adaptable and well-designed pages are more important that
designing-by-numbers.
OK – so right or left?
In the right corner we have
Debehams, Net-a-Porter, Woolworths, Saks and Fortnum & Mason. In the left corner we have John Lewis, Marks
and Spencers, Boots, Macys, Nordstrom and Sephora. And somewhere in-between are HMV and Amazon.
Do any of
these sites suffer usability issues? Amazon does not appear to have any usability
issues with their left-of-centre search box.
Information architecture is essentially
the art of organising information. A rule
for positioning the search box in the top right ignores the interconnectivity
of the page elements. A successful page
design depends on page dynamics and page elements should not be viewed in
isolation but as part of the bigger picture.
OK – so left or right?
#1 Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool both
take the view that the search box should be placed in a prominent position on
either left or right side.
#2 In a recent study only 31% of sites
had the search box positioned on the right side so even for those advocates of
‘familiarity breeds usability’ this is not conclusive enough to infer that a
search box should be placed on the right.
#3 Eyetracking studies
that show that users look for the search box in 4 or 5 main regions. Users therefore do not make the assumption
that it is always positioned in the top right.
OK – so right or left?
I don’t have the answer as it depends on a number of factors. However, there are some basic principles I always
follow,
- Make the search box prominent
- Position towards top of page
- Repeat on every page
- Use explicit labelling (e.g. Search)
- Keep a clear exclusion zone around the search
box
- test with users
- test with user
- and test with users
Providing the user can easily locate
the search box then it does not matters whether it’s right, left or somewhere
in-between. Testing with your users is critical. By making assumptions
that because other sites are doing something means that it is right can often
lead projects to overlook these elements when user testing.