With every passing generation, we seem to be getting increasingly impatient. We want to get things done as soon as possible without needless hassle. That’s why the search bar design is becoming an increasingly important part of a great web product. It allows people to easily find what they are looking for without browsing through category pages or product menus.
The search bar is also a key retention mechanic for SEO-driven traffic. If a user lands on your page from Google, you want them to stay with you. But if your search experience is subpar, they’ll just go back to Google and likely land on a competitor’s product next time.
Yet, the search bar design doesn’t get much attention, especially among less experienced designers. It’s often one of these “must-have elements” that just needs to be done. People add a magnifying glass icon, create a basic search input, and think they’re done.
That’s a costly mistake.
Great search bar design makes it easy and fun to find relevant items. Poor search design makes people churn.
With that in mind, I’ll share a few of the personal-best principles that I use when designing a search bar.
A visitor should be able to start the search process within two seconds of thinking they need to look for something or landing on a page. As crazy as it might sound, it’s actually not that hard if you don’t overengineer your search bar design.
The most basic search bar design principles are things like:
Once you check the box on these three principles, test the two-second rule on your own. If you can’t start searching within two seconds, determine what’s slowing you down and eliminate that.
Also, if the search isn’t one of your users’ primary actions, you can stretch it to five seconds at most.
Autocomplete in a search bar design serves a few purposes. It:
I get it if this seems like more of an engineering challenge than a design challenge. But UX designers also play a critical role in creating intuitive search bar autocomplete mechanics.
Search is a good place to upsell recommended products to users. And if you can add a touch of personalization, it might even become your best-selling channel.
For example, if you visit newbalance.com and start a search, you’ll be hit with “Recommendations For You,” which will be replaced with search results as you start typing:
Another example is a Polish website, x-kom.pl. The website always shows recommended items next to search results whenever you query:
It’s basically a personalized ad that’s highly relevant to a user. Apart from boosting your sales overall, you can get some hefty direct partnership deals to promote particular products during the search process.
Although “Search” might sound like an obvious choice for placeholder text for a search bar, it could be a wasted opportunity.
A great search placeholder copy should achieve three purposes:
For example, if you land on brainly.com, you’ll get a “Search for an answer to any question” placeholder copy. Apart from indicating search, it clarifies what you can search for — an answer to a question — and incorporates some value proposition — “any” question:
A dating app’s search bar can use placeholder copy such as “Find your soulmate” or “Search for your next date.” This will highlight the potential outcome of the search and motivate users to invest some effort in finding the right partner.
Small tweaks to copy can make a big difference, so experiment with that often.
Sometimes, finding the correct item might be more complicated than just typing in the name. The bigger your collection, the more filters you’ll need for precise search.
There are two types of filtered search.
First, you can use simple categorization. For example, eBay.com has “All Categories” as default in its search bar, but you can switch it to a specific product category to narrow search results.
It’s especially useful when a product uses a generic name that’s popular across different product categories.
But if the categorized search is insufficient, you can do an even more detailed search query on eBay and narrow down search results to aspects like keywords, condition, type of sale, price, and so on:
As you can imagine, this type of experience is needed in rare, specific cases. Yet, having a dedicated flow to support those searches is still worth it. Buyers performing very specific and detailed searches, although in the minority, are often the most decided buyers. After all, they already know what they want to purchase.
Keeping advanced UX search principles like this one will go a long, long way in spiking your sales graphs.
Instant search results make the search experience both more fun and more reliable.
Instant search results happen when the user gets a result for a given query on the go without the need to click Enter. In other words, it’s autocomplete taken to another level — instead of just recommending the most popular query, you already show results for it.
The first benefit of instant search results is efficiency. Users can type and retype the query many times without jumping between pages. It makes the search process both faster and less annoying.
The second benefit is exposure to additional items. For example, a searcher might get an instant result that, although isn’t what they were looking for, ends up being something they’re interested in purchasing. Each additional channel to promote and sell more products without being too sales-y is a big win when it comes to revenue numbers.
Lastly, some people simply love playing around with this feature and might accidentally buy something while doing so. I am guilty of that myself!
Voice search isn’t a very popular feature right now, but I bet that’ll change dramatically in the near future.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are increasingly more reliant on voice search. And AI models like ChatGPT are taking voice interfaces to the next level. So voice search is getting more popular in general.
In most cases, adding a voice search shouldn’t require much engineering effort, and it might help you ride in the trend wave before it even starts.
Designers often underappreciate search bar experience, yet it can be a game-changer in overall product performance.
I find that a great search bar design motivates people to use the search (even making it fun to do so), helps find the right product effortlessly, and can even introduce users to new products.
If you implement all these principles that I shared in this blog, your search experience will already be better than 80% of search bare. From there, you just need to experiment and innovate based on your research and the needs of your specific audience.
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