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How easily can your customers find what they want on your website if they’re less perfect than the computer running your online store?

My brother and I are both designers now, but in our desperate student days, we both worked in retail. To his credit, Tim managed about six years in a local supermarket, whereas I only survived about eighteen months, but we each came away with some bizarre stories. One of Tim’s favourites was the guy who came in and asked for some “one point five zeroes”. After a while, Tim worked out that the guy was looking for one point five litre bottles of Sprite Zero.

My point is that customers have some pretty weird ideas about search. Would your website understand a request like the one above? If someone typed “presents” into the search box on your website, would they get a helpful response? (This actually happened to me once, in real life: to this day, I don’t know if they were serious or not.)

This is an area of the user experience called ‘Search Tolerance’, and it focuses on whether a user will get back meaningful results from a search, no matter if their query is too broad, too narrow, or just poorly spelled.

A proper example

Say I am looking for information about my wireless router, a D-Link DSL-604T. Already, I bet you can see several ways I could type that in wrongly. Let’s look at a few:

Case Tolerance

This is a fairly obvious one, and the one most search engines get right. Can I find what I’m after if I don’t use the ‘proper’ capitalisation?

Example: d-link dsl-604t

Format Tolerance

What happens if I don’t put all the hyphens in the right place? Or I put in extra spaces?

Example: dlink dsl 604 t

Truncation tolerance

What if I leave some of the letters out of my query?

Example: link dsl604

Error tolerance

All these numbers confuse me. This is a little bit like Google’s ‘did you mean…’ facility, but I have to say that about half the time, no, I didn’t.

Example: d-lunk dsl-614

Other things to think about include:

• What if someone spells something the American way? My shop’s in Auckland!
• What if someone can’t spell at all?
• What if someone types ‘flowers’ into my search box? I’m a florist!
• What if someone types something really weird into the search box? Should I just tell them there were no results, or should I give them some suggestions of popular products to start their search? (Guess which one I’d like to see more often…)

Most, if not all, of these things are pretty easy to correct, but coping sensibly with seemingly nonsensical user input makes all the difference in terms of helping your potential customers find what they want.

Thks fr reeadin.