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As I promise, I’ll write a series of articles about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The prologue of this series had defined some terms from HCI theory. This article is focused on web interfaces, especially website search interfaces.

First rule: do not return “No results” on any search. Try to find some answers for the user even the keyword is something like “asdsad dfdsf sdf”. If your site sells something, user should always have the opportunity to buy.

Second rule: suggest keywords. There are two ways of suggesting keywords: in the search box and on the site as links.

In the search box: Using javascript you can make your search box smarter by suggesting keywords in the same manner as Apple does on their website.

On the site as links: We found many implementations for this kind of keyword suggestion. One of them is called “tag cloud”. I prefer this implementation because of simplicity. Users easily see a list of keywords: “cat, dog, animal, bird” without any action (click in a search box, type a letter etc.)

Third rule: Do not return too many answers. Messages like “We found 123231 results for your search” are not welcome on sites other then search engines. People rarely browse more the 50 results and it doesn’t make sense to show 1000.

Forth rule: Organize results by importance. If you sell books, for example, you will prefer to return the results ordered by book popularity and not alphabetically or price ascending.

Fifth rule: Offer different sorting and filtering criteria. Allow user to sort books by price, by author or by year, for example.

All those rules will make user’s life much easier and most probably will come back happily.

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