Ask HN: Sites with the best search/browse UX

1 points by shedletsky 10 years ago | 1 comment

I am developing a B2B eCommerce site that will accommodate a wide range of asset types.

I am working on the browse/search aspect of the site and trying to develop UX that will allow both usage modalities to happen on the same page.

I am not a professional UX designer and I am hoping to draw inspiration from other web sites. I am going for a sleek, modern, and mobile friendly feel (though for the best user experience I am willing to make 2 versions of the page, desktop and mobile).

Is there an eCommerce site that you feel totally nails searching and browsing from a UX perspective? If so, what key thing do they do better than other sites?

The two I use most often are Amazon and eBay, but in my opinion they are good at search but bad at browsing. I think Zillow is good-to-great with regards to browsing, but that may say more about the information compactness of maps vs text than anything else.

Is browsing UX a harder problem than search UX?

thegrif 10 years ago |

I think search is much harder than browsing. I think what you're seeing on Amazon (and other sites) is that both search and browse is driven off the same set of data. In other words, navigation is created on the fly based on the products within each section. It doesn't matter whether you start by browsing and then search or vice versa - you'll get the same navigational experience.

BestBuy does a bit better job with this - but they too are employing the same strategy - they just don't expose the facets until you're two levels down in the taxonomy. Which makes sense - because usually facets are going to be too much if the user is too high in the taxonomy or brings back too diverse of a results set.

Amazon appliances: http://www.amazon.com/Appliances/b/ref=nav_shopall_ha?ie=UTF...

Bestbuy appliances: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/electronics/home-appliances/abca...

Sears follows the BestBuy approach and alters it slightly by showing iteratively more complex faceting options as you drill down.

Sears is broken down into ~30 departments: http://www.sears.com/en_us/sitemap.html

For each department, they have a nice landing page to facilitate discovery of their most popular sub-departments as well as a page that lists all the sub-departments:

http://www.sears.com/appliances/b-1020003 http://www.sears.com/en_us/sitemap/appliances.html

(as a note, I would wager that sitemap/appliances.html is purely an SEO tactic)

Not integrated with the navigation is also the search results page for the same data that drives all of the navigation throughout the appliances department:

http://www.sears.com/search=?levels=Appliances&catalogId=126...

From http://www.sears.com/appliances/b-1020003:

Drill down into a product category and you get simple facets on the left:

http://www.sears.com/appliances-washers-dryers/b-1320301405?...

For some popular sub-categories they have chosen to do landing pages as well. Like for specialty laundry:

http://www.sears.com/appliances-washers-dryers-specialty-lau...

The same results can be found here (in the search results interface):

http://www.sears.com/search=?levels=Appliances_Specialty%20L...

In the end though, you eventually hit the faceted navigation interface:

http://www.sears.com/appliances-specialty-laundry-centers/b-...

Home Depot has followed the same design approach - showing a level of detail in the facets that tries to match whether the user is in discovery mode or has the intent to purchase something specific.

As you can tell, I have spent way too much time thinking about and building search results pages. Feel free to reach out to me - I'm @thegrif on Twitter or linkedin.com/in/tomgriffin on LinkedIn.