Search facilities are an unusual and difficult design problem. I can help with user interface design and ranking optimisation.
Designing the Search Experience
We tend to think of search as a simple interface – just an input box and a list of links. From this point of view, designing search should be just a question of layout and styling, but this is a mistake.
There are lots of choices that we can make in creating a search tool: Should we have one search, or multiple categories? Should we have an ‘All’ search? Would filters be useful? Should we paginate or use infinite scrolling?
I can help to demystify search and guide you in creating a great search experience for your users.
Autosuggest
Many searches offer some form of autosuggest. However, there are several different types and it is not always clear what the most effective approach is. I can analyse your content and the context of the search tool in order to suggest the best approach.
Optimising Search Ranking
Many companies have a need for a search facility and in most cases, the sensible solution is to buy in search technology such as Autonomy, Elastic or Google. These tools provide a host of functionality and options out-of-the-box, but it can be difficult to know how to set them up to achieve the best ranking performance for you particular content.
I can help you to analyse you content and the technology, using data visualisation and mathematical techniques to test ranking performance and find the best settings.
Martin Colebourne 