This week, our tips are about using Refinements in your site search to improve your visitors’ experience and help them more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. Refinements are especially useful if there are several pages of search results for a particular keyword, and are a good way to allow searchers to sort results by various criteria, like price range, color, brand, sale items, etc. Some standard out-of-the-box site search offerings don’t allow you to do much in the way of refinements, but we believe good refinements are an important aspect of any effective site search. Below are some tips that might be helpful – and of course, if you want more useful suggestions you can download the full “Big Book of Site Search Tips” for free from our web site.
- Show the number of results next to individual refinement options (include image from whitepaper) – In other words, where you show the available refinements, also show the number of results from the master list that fall under that refinement, so visitors have an idea of how many results are available to them. A good example is SLI customer Lighting by Gregory. They provide a good assortment of refinements, and next to each refinement is the number of items in that category, which further streamlines the search experience.
- Show color refinements as a palette (include image from whitepaper) – Colors by their very nature are visual, so rather than showing the colors in text as a refinement option, show the actual colors in a palette. This makes it easy to select multiple colors and it takes up less screen real estate.
Showing the number of results in the refinements |
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Color palettes in refinements |
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