Best practices for website search design

Have you wondered if Google Search didn't work like it's supposed to be? Most of us might still be using Yahoo or Bing.

According to Semrush, approximately, there are about 5.9 million Google searches per minute. That is a whopping number.

What does search in website design supposed to do?

So generally, websites with a huge amount of content, it would be a good UX practice to have a search function or module to allow users to get to your content as fast as possible.

But do bear in mind that it needs to fulfill the users' expectation of a proper search experience.

Here are some tips on how to build a good search experience for your website.

How to design your search form?

First of all, the design of the form has to be world-class.

Put the search bar where everyone is expecting it

Most e-commerce websites will have their search bar in the center of their navbar or somewhere close to the main action points of the navbar which is the account or shopping cart. And most of the times, the navbar design is set to stick at the top of the page so that the search bar is always accessible to their users.

If you're still unsure of where to put your search bar, you can use this rule:

If your website is more geared towards discovery and exploration, the upper right corner would be good else, keep it front and centred!

Add the magnifying glass icon and a text prompt

Do not rely on only icons to communicate meaning to users. It is best to describe what the icon can do and hence you should always have a text prompt to support the use of the search icon (usually it's a magnifying glass).

Even though the magnifying glass has a universal language that users understand, you should try to pair it to increase the users' experience. And by adding certain prompts to guide the users on what they might be searching for (use machine learning or AI to show prompts for your users!), might just be the extra delightful trait of your website.

Input box should have a reasonable size

Please do not ignore this!

If your search bar is small, it creates a certain frustration for users when they cannot even see what they are typing, especially for long form searches. So generally, the design of your search box has minimum width and height to contain the average query size against your content.

Clients do state that the size of the navigational bar is relatively small because of the number of links. So what can you do?

Why not create an interaction to expand the box when a user clicks into it?

Design a superb empty state

Why is this important?

This whole idea of creating and design an empty state for your search results is to make sure that your users will not leave disappointed. It's important to give suggestions to them if you can't exactly show what your users are looking for. These solutions make your users feel assured that you are trying to help them instead of leaving them with nothing.

Take a look at Ikea's search results page.

A user enters something that is not in their inventory, but the search results shows products that are close to the spelling of the word. The intention of this wonderful website is to always ensure that the user can move further into the website without disrupting their user journey.