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  • Author Author: Dudley
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Improving search experience on our transactional sites

Dudley

We've had a response from our search team about some of the complaints we've had about searching on the transactional site.

 

 

We’ve been receiving some excellent feedback from you all on our new parametric search page. It’s a big step forward for us, making an effort to follow industry best practices. We totally appreciate that with any leap forward, we also need to remain agile as we test out these kinds of modifications. And your feedback is helping us to quickly hone in on what’s needed.

 

Some recommendations, like the removal of the white banner at the top of the page that says “You can view all these products now, or if you know what you are looking to find, you can narrow the results down further using the filters” is already under way. However, its removal places a considerable load on our infrastructure because it leads to products being shown right away with a lot of data, so we just need to phase it’s removal across the 40+ websites. Rest assured it’s all underway, though.

 

Other concerns, such as the speed and performance of filters, are being closely monitored and where issues can be nailed down, they’re being addressed. We’re working hard on all changes, monitoring and measurement, and we appreciate all the help and feedback you’ve been providing.

 

We’ll keep you updated on our progress right here in the comments (feel free to bookmark this post so you get the news as it happens).

 

Best regards,

 

Your design team.

 

  • in reply to shabaz

    I'll make sure they know that image

     

    Thanks . Calm, balanced and well thought out feedback, as ever!

  • Hi Dudley,

     

    Thanks for getting us the update!

    One point, not sure if it was clear from the feedback, is that in many of the comments so far, the reference to speed means the user interaction time and number of clicks and scrolling and moving focus from the side bar to elsewhere, rather than the server response time. The 'speed and performance of filters' in the text above didn't make it clear if it was server response time which was being monitored, or the issues mentioned.

     

    Traditionally having a horizontally scrolling pane at the top is a typical UI no-no for other businesses, but I suspect works for engineers who are used to spreadsheets and 'programming-in' a search by setting all parameters as such. I appreciate that the dynamic thing showing how many search items will be shown is useful, but generally engineers won't navigate away if the first search reveals too much or too little, they will just iteratively fine-tune the search provided it is speedy to do so.

     

    To be honest I could be completely wrong, I don't have the knowledge to know how long it takes users to perform searches and successfully select the desired parts. Just wanted to make sure that the transactional site team are aware that the feedback isn't necessarily about server response time speed.