Recently I've been pondering one of the most basic principles of website usability: people don't use my site like I do. No, that's not quite it. It's more accurate to say this: people don’t use my site like I think they should. I've put a lot of time into making it easy to navigate, and yet still I'm surprised by the way people choose to get around my store.  

One nice feature of my e-commerce site is the ability to see what terms people enter into my store search box. Per month, the average is about 400 unique terms for a total of about 600 searches, since many common terms are searched for more than once. A few are spammy (or silly), but the majority of them are legitimate.

I've worked very, very hard to create logically ordered, easy-to-navigate categories for my store items. I have 20 categories in my store, and the maximum number of items per category right now is 25; most categories have fewer. The average number of items per category is about 10. Really, really easy to navigate, right? Yet many people seem to prefer searching for items rather than browsing for them.

At first, I was really critical of this. "When it comes to e-commerce, I browse. I don't search," I'd say disdainfully. Then I began to really think about it. The truth is, sometimes I browse, and sometimes I search, and sometimes I do both. Basically it varies based on how large the site is and what I’m looking for.

When I use a really large site like Amazon or eBay, I start by searching for keywords. Their categories are simply too big to browse. I can often find exactly what I’m looking for just by searching. However, sometimes after searching for certain keywords, if I don't find what I'm looking for right away I narrow my search by browsing individual categories.

At smaller sites (I buy a lot of children's books and toys at mom-and-pop e-commerce sites), I often browse through categories first. Why? Well, I figure the category won't be that large, and I like to see what I'll stumble across that I might not have noticed if I used keywords. Also, in my experience search boxes at smaller sites don't always return every relevant item. I've often happened upon something I was looking for by browsing through a category after looking for it unsuccessfully using the search box.

At most blogs – just to move away from e-commerce for a second – I find myself using categories instead of searching. I'm a fast reader, and I don't mind skimming a few posts to find what I'm looking for. I like what I learn along the way. I only use a search box if I am looking for a very, very specific post and I don't see anything related to it in the list of categories.

According to Steve Krug's usability handbook, "Don’t Make Me Think" (which is highly recommended by everyone, and rightly so), most people prefer searching. Jakob Nielson calls them "search-dominant" users, and they will almost always look for a search box right away upon entering a site. Krug compares searching vs. browsing a website to the difference between asking a clerk for help (using a search box) and simply walking through the aisles until you find what you're looking for (browsing through categories). Sure enough, I'm an aisle-walker. I'll even pass an employee and still not ask where to find something even if I've been up and down every aisle three times.

Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about how people will find us in the first place. I've devoted thousands of hours to SEO for my website. Somewhat embarrassingly, I've spent less time thinking about how people find what they're looking for once they actually reach my site. I think both are important, and now that I have a nice, steady stream of traffic to my site, I'm really focusing on converting more of that traffic to sales.

I've embraced the fact that people like to search my site. They just do. So, I've been trying to optimize the search experience at my store to the best of my abilities. For starters, my store gives me the option to enter in search keywords for each item I list. Besides the words I use in my titles and descriptions, I can add other terms that will cause those items to come up in a search. If I add "north america" to the keyword box for "world map," then that item will come up in a search for "north america" even if "north america" isn’t mentioned in the title or description. 

Every month I look through the search terms that produced no results, and find any that are relevant to the items I'm selling. A recent example was when someone searched for "outer space" – great term, but not one that I normally use to describe my astronomy materials. I went and added "outer space" to the keyword boxes for all of my astronomy items. (Yep, someone searched for "outer space" when, right below the search box, there is a category called "Astronomy." Those wacky search-dominant users!) But I am also careful not to add irrelevant terms to various items just to return more results; I can see how that would harm the shopping experience just as much as getting no results at all.

My website is a lot more than just an e-commerce site. I have articles, interviews, blog posts, and free downloads for parents and teachers. To my chagrin, people are searching for these items using my store search box. The way my store is set up, only items actually listed for sale come up in searches, which makes complete sense to me. Here's where the "But that's not how I'd use my site!" kicks in. Unfortunately, it's not returning any results for someone who's looking for my latest blog post on child development or my free download about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  

I haven't come up with a perfect solution, but for now, when someone gets "0 results" at my store, they also get a message saying that only items for sale can be found through search; and right on the "0 results" page, I provide direct links to my blog posts, articles, and free downloads (even though they're already in my store's universal header). You can see what that looks like here. A better solution – if I have the time someday – would be to have a separate search box just for the information available at my site. At the very least, I need a search box just for my blog. Yes, I’m FTP'ing Blogger to my site, and yes, I know it's not the very best blogging platform in the world, but I started using Blogger before they had any kind of search capabilities. Migrating all my posts to a new CMS is another thing on my very long to-do list.

A third solution to the search problem would be to have a search box that searches my entire site, and returns both items for sale as well as articles and blog posts, but that weakens the e-commerce experience for people who are only trying to make a purchase. I have worked hard to make my website a comprehensive one, with information as well as items to buy, but I can see now that the more you add, the more complicated the usability question becomes.

As I work on refining and improving the search experience for my customers and visitors, I have begun to see – in just a teeny, tiny way – what a huge job the search engines have when they try to return relevant results to users. You can easily end up with too few results or too many, or results that are not even remotely related to what you're looking for. We've all had that experience when we try to find things on the web. Search algorithms may seem to be unnecessarily complex, but if I have to continually fine-tune a search box that's only got 200 possible results in total, I can't even begin to comprehend how to sort through billions of possible results. So, even though I'm often critical of the search engines (especially when I'm not ranking the way I think I should), today I tip my hat to the people who make information retrieval on the web possible for all of us.

I hope you enjoyed this little peek into my little corner of the e-commerce world. I think that SEO and usability for small businesses is a potentially huge, relatively untapped market (do-it-yourselfers like me are always looking for helpful info), and I'd like to see more posts about it on the main blog and YOUmoz too. I hope to share more of my own thoughts soon!