King Arthur Flour is an excellent example of an eCommerce website that has taken its community and content to the next level. Not only does the website have tools and materials for bakers, they have a thriving community of pastry enthusiasts who share and discuss the best baking recipes and articles. So I was very excited to work with such an interesting company when they contacted us to build their new site search.
Their vibrant community contains a plethora of recipes, products, and articles, which translates into tons and tons of data. The volumes of data not only fall under one segment, but there also exists “different types” of data with unique categories under each product, recipe, and article. So a search for “cookie” must be made easy enough so that visitors can get to a specific cookie cutter, cookie mix, or cookie recipe without going through hundreds of search results.
Beyond their data, their new site search required an easy-to-use and clean user interface to match their streamlined design. Website usability and design alone are two of the most vital but difficult areas to perfect. You can easily over or under bake your website by adding too many or not enough toppings and ingredients. Too many features, and you get an overly complex website with lots of clutter; not enough features and your visitors are unable to fully utilize the website.
After reviewing their feed and discussing King Arthur Flour’s requirements, we decided that Adaptive Rich Auto Complete was a right recipe for their content-rich but visually clean site.
Adaptive Rich Auto Complete queries different “data sets” on the fly depending on what section of the site visitors are on. If the visitor performs a search for “cookies” in the recipes section, the visitor should only see cookie recipes in the Rich Auto Complete drop down and not cookie products. Similarly the Rich Auto Complete drop down will only display cookie products when the visitor is in the products tab.
Since website real estate is limited in a Rich Auto Complete drop down, retailers need to make sure that only the most relevant and properly segmented results show up. Adaptive Rich Auto Complete helps reduce additional refinement clicks needed to get to the right product, which leads to faster order times, less frustration, and more sales. This has to be not only one of the coolest looking features I’ve seen on a site, but also one of the most functionally useful.
I have to add that even though King Arthur Flour’s site search concoction was a complex mix that had to be served in a tight implementation time frame, the team at King Arthur Flour was highly responsive, receptive and definitely a pleasure to work with.
Feel free to email me at discovery@sli-systems.com or call 1 (866) 240 -2812 if you would like to hear more about how I worked with King Arthur Flour.
