Award winning intranet search

A further two IBF Best Intranet Awards were presented this week to:

• BT for Intranet Search
• HSBC for Usability

So what makes up a good search on an intranet?

IBF evaluates people and content search based on the steps users must perform to find results:

• Specify the search text
• Assess the search results
• Access the search results ...and as most people start searching without really knowing what they are looking for…
• Refine or revise and search again

So looking in a little more detail at these steps, look at your own intranet search and ask the following questions...

The search box – making it easy for the searcher

• Is a people search available from every page?
• Is content search available on every page?
• Does people and content search each have its own search box?
• Is it in the same place on every page?
• Is the search field on results page ready for the next search?

The ease of assessing and accessing the search results

• Does the results page provide feedback and advice, especially if there are no results?
• How detailed are the search results?  Just page titles, or people’s names are often not enough
• Does the information on the results page allow the searcher to make an informed choice about which are worth investigating further?
• Are the results laid out clearly on the page?
• How many are clearly displayed on the first pages (users still hate scrolling!)Does the results page indicate how many items were found?How good are the results shown?  If the first few are poor, trust in the search engine rapidly reduces
• Is there a clue about what has been found?  A web page, a document, a PowerPoint presentation?

Supporting the need to tweak the search text and search again.

As mentioned above many searches start by not really knowing what they are looking for.  The first search is often used to help them refine the search to then try again to find what they really want.

• Does the results page include search feedback and advice?
• Are there suggestions for other spellings or close spellings?
• If there are no results, do your results just say ‘no results found’, or does it try to help the user?
• Is the original search text there on the same page, so it can be easily adjusted?

Next we’ll be looking in more detail at what BT have been doing recently around Intranet search and why they won the IBF award.

Comments

[John Robey]

From what I have heard and seen is that the more text boxes that are placed on the page, the more potential for confusion by the user about which text box to use.

One of the most convincing reasons why users enter URLs into search text boxes that I have read is that they confuse the search text box with the Google plugin search and even the browser address bar. It would be interesting to see the failure rates on how often the users enter their terms into the correct text box as well as to be pointed to further information about why having two search text boxes on the same page is good for an intranet search. Most other implementations I have seen use tabs to prefilter the user's query before they even enter anything into the search text box.

[Helen Day]

Thanks for your comments John, an interesting point you raise about two search boxes. I managed a large intranet in the UK were we had a single search box for both people and content search, but expected users to click the relevant radio button to chose one of the two search options. When observing users, many would not select the radio button and end up doing the wrong search by mistake.... every solution brings it's own challenges :-)