When a user needs an answer regarding your offering, time is of the essence — conversion or customer satisfaction hang in the balance. Today’s sites contain libraries of information that users expect to quickly query and filter to find answers. A well-designed search experience is the fastest way meet that need.
If a customer arrives at your site, clicks on support and then submits a search, he is probably trying to solve a problem. Scoping the search to support content seems like it’d make things easier for the user — but there are risks involved with “scoping without warning”.
Scoped Search is Risky
Moderating usability testing on a site that used scoped searches by default, I’ve seen users struggle when they don’t realize that they were searching only one section of the site. Jakob Nielsen pointed out this danger in a May 2001 Alertbox entitled Search: Visible and Simple. He writes:
Users often overlook the scope, or they think they are in a different site area than the one they are actually searching.
The options for a well-designed scoped search, then, might be to either:
- Default to a query of all content unless the user identified a limited scope upon submission (See how Kontain.com offers a scoped search dropdown.)
- Disclose a suggested search scope very prominently as the user engages the search field, then enable the user to adjust the scope option if he so chooses.
Scoped Search Meets Context and Control
Microsoft.com/support does exactly the latter. When I went to microsoft.com and clicked on support, the default text in the search field identified the pre-selected scope - “Search Microsoft Support”.
But it didn’t stop there. When I focused my cursor on the search field, a dropdown appeared below, catching my eye. It presented the list of scoped options and identified the option that has been pre-selected, and I could adjust the scope if I wanted to.
Pre-selected scope can add value for the user. This implementation captures that value while clearly disclosing that a scope is selected and enabling the user to change that scope if he wants to.
Unsurprisingly, this pattern isn’t consistent across Microsoft web properties, but I’d be interested to see how users interact with it in this instance.
Your thoughts on scoped search? Sound off in the comments.
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