Seek and ye shall not find
With so many good examples of site search to follow these days, it’s quite surprising to come across search functionality that is truly awful. It’s especially surprising when it’s Debenhams, a big company with a good reputation that clearly invests a lot of money in their online presence.
Consider a simple task, like the one I was trying to carry out – trying to find a new blind for my office. I knew that Debenhams sell things for homes, but didn’t know whether they sold blinds or not. On the Debenhams home page, the first thing that strikes you about the home page is an extremely unsubtle hint that they’re having a sale. I think people will just about get the message there. The second thing, especially if you’re looking for a blind, is that there is no search.
Blinds should be in Home and Furniture, so at least there’s a sensible navigation option for me to follow. There’s nothing too obvious on the Home and Furniture page, but a search box has appeared, so it makes sense to just type “blind”.
Hang on, though – what’s this? Light pink sleeveless tie back jersey top? Yellow broderie anglais frill bikini halter neck top? Not exactly the sort of search results I’d expect to get from a search for ‘blind’. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no mention of blind – or any products vaguely related to blinds – anywhere in the first page of results.
It turns out (as far as I can tell) that if you type in any non-fashion item (e.g. spoon, sofa), the results presented are always in the context of one of Debenham’s departments – usually the women’s or men’s clothing departments. This seems bizarre in the extreme, especially when the results seem to be completely unrelated to the search term. You have to select the “home and furniture” results to find a venetian blind in the results. And even then “Leather 3 seat sofa” appears before it!
There seem to be at least three quite elementary lessons for Debenhams to learn here:
- Provide a search box on the home page (and every page!)
- Make sure that the search term actually occurs in the results that are displayed (just what search algorithm are they using?!)
- Don’t impose context for your search results (although allowing users to filter all results by departments would be OK)
It’s not rocket surgery, is it?
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I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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Glad you’ve taken this site to task – I tried to use it to buy Christmas presents this year, and gave up and went to the store instead where a visual search was for more useful! Another anomaly is that the ‘help’ link in the bottom navigation bar goes to a different page, depending on where you are in the site. On this home page, it links to a ‘How to use this site’ page, which has an FAQ section, which in turn suggests “At the top right hand side of every screen, type in a keyword relevant to the product or service you require, select a department and click on Search. You will automatically be shown the search results with text links that take you to the relevant products.” which isn’t actually true on two counts (the order of select department and search is wrong, and the search is not on every page), as you’ve shown in your post.
I also enjoy the fact that it’s the first site I’ve seen which recommends you using a “PC Pentium 200Mhz or faster with 32Mb RAM” to view it – see the site help link, bottom right of (almost) every page!