How do you ‘Search’?
I’m being curious these days about how people search for information on digital products.
Search opens up a world of information, it’s a door to many wonders.
In my opinion, search is one of the trickiest features a digital product team will ever build.
It doesn’t have the bells and whistles, it is boring to work on.
But it can be the most powerful and impactful feature of your product. Because it does not just impact the goals of the users, it also impacts the perception around the product’s capability.
Search feature generates curiosity.
Imagine you have built a kickass, powerful product for a bunch of eager users.
You tell them to go ahead, try it out and then tell you what they think of the product.
The first thing that they would do to test waters and dip just a bit of their feet, would be when they look for information on your product – what it represents, what it stands for, contains, entails, what it can provide, what it cannot do, and so on.
Your users will never begin using your product as a creator, they will always begin as a viewer and as an explorer, as a learner.
A well-placed search feature will help your users navigate through the nuances of your shiny new product. Just out of curiosity, they will try to search anything that they can – especially if it’s an unguided search feature.
They are curious what the results would be. They will be exhilarated with validation if they can generate results on the screen because they were looking for something. All because they typed a few words and numbers, in a matter of seconds!
This exhilarating feeling is what hooks the users to your product.
They will do more on your product, they’ll feel delighted, and they will try some experiments to test the deeper, seemingly complex features.
Ultimately, a good search feature is what will improve the usage of your product, driving its ultimate adoption, and influencing the other important metrics associated with your product like CSAT, NPS, Churn Rate, Retention, Usage Time, DAU, MAU, and so on.
Additionally, I believe that while some products can live without a search feature (eg – a Calculator), a product cannot survive with a poor search feature.
A poor/bad search feature is something that:
- doesn’t respond to your queries in a meaningful manner
- leaves you confused or second-guessing your quest for information
- takes too long to deliver results
- delivers results in a very restricted manner
- delivers too many results at a time (without, say, proper pagination)
- delivers too few results
- doesn’t save your clicks
- makes you search the same thing all over again
- doesn’t improve over time
- doesn’t assist you if you don’t know what to search for
- shows you irrelevant results
- shows you relevant results if you search with absolutely the exact keywords
- is very hard to locate on the product
- doesn’t tell you if it is loading results for you
For a product, especially a new product to succeed, make sure the information is easy to understand. If there’s too much information to process for the user – give them an option to search and get what they need so that they can ignore the rest. If the search cannot serve as a good search tool – better not expose it to the end-user from the get-go.
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