Search Results
Xerox.com
The search results page on Xerox.com had a few ways to improve. The metrics showed high traffic, followed by departure. We were going to fix that.
Service
Content Analysis
Collaboration + Card Sorting
Information Design
Contribution
Wireframes
Mockups
At Xerox North America, there are a wide range of divisions. From product designs to document management. A large part of Marketing and product owners were there as well.
Make it stand out.
Challenge
A common challenge for large websites is the massive amount of content. With a worldwide perspective, users of different languages and cultures will search in diverse ways. This makes broad appeal more important in search results. Search, for better or worse, is the fall-back flow. If users cannot quickly find what they desire from the page content, they initiate a search. If users give us a second chance, we want to provide them with what they want.
Solution
We started by learning what the most common keywords were. After we established that these topics were important. I designed a visual language for how keyword matches could be presented more prominently while retaining the original results' behavior.
What Users Really Want
The Final Goal
The bulk of the effort to improve the search use cases focused on illuminating the final goal.
That wasn’t to get search results! Indeed, users were using the search tool to find a specific piece of content. Perhaps what they wanted couldn’t be articulated yet, but we can extrapolate what might be desired based on frequency.
Figuring out what folks desire brings us to the design. It’s a good idea to be faithful to the existing results since we don’t want to pull the rug out from under them.
We do, however, want to provide shortcuts to their goals.
We want to avoid a scenario where users grow tired of searching and not finding what they want, so they give up. Anything is better than that.
Wireframes
We started with the pre-existing page wrapper and the current search results content because neither were in-scope to change. Then we had a big area to try different ways to show content. We could land on a handful of different ways to expound on the term entered from articles to shopping. Some common keywords included ‘printer’ ‘ink,’ which was, more or less, an invitation to upsell related products. What better place to start that dialog than in the search?
Topical Results (Specific)
Topical Results
Product Results
Product Series Results
Product Type
Keyword: Product (Specific)
Keyword: Product (General)
Focus Level 2
Focus Level 1 (Article)
Focus Level 3
Content Design
A similar type of document was used when trying to figure out groups of content and when they would be most acceptable. A similar wireframe was used to provide high-level grouping to stakeholders.
Staying Faithful to the Familiar
We wanted to keep up with the expectation of what search results looked like on Xerox.com. There was never a question of how to change it. The silent agreement was that users of the previous decade were quite used to how search results appeared. We wanted to stay faithful to that expectation.
Interesting Shortcuts
Since we weren’t going to orphan users by replacing the existing search, we had a natural opportunity to provide some exciting shortcuts. Even the original design contained a large area of unused space. Now we could use that space to create all sorts of exciting entrances.
Shortcut for Every Season
We realized that every topic had a range of ways to reach it. Some people liked the text, while others like graphics and others still liked retail elements. Since we had a set of the 25 most common searches, we had a lot of opportunity to try different combinations to see which ones worked best.
Domain Knowledge
Search Results
SEO
Most Common Keywords
Design Tools
OmniGraffle
Freemind
Office