Needless to say that a search box is a critical element in a website usability these days, especially if it’s a website with a lot of pages and elements that we’re talking about. Today these functional elements are implemented almost on every website, and there’s a reason for that. Most of the default search boxes are powered by some search engines like Bing or Google and you as a simple user think that it is more than enough for the visitors. Having a well-thought search with simple and rich interface is equal to having another main navigation menu on your website. Search box helps your visitors to find precisely what they are looking for and obviously it is very comfortable and influences a lot on your website’s UX as well as bounce rates and conversion rates.

Our today’s subject has two basic components that should be taken into consideration, these are the design attractiveness and the search functionality. Provide your visitors with visually attractive, simple and intuitive search box and you’ll see the positive results very soon. Before we start I would like you to pay attention to a number of things that you should consider before placing the search box at your website. So, here are the don’ts:

• don’t place your search box at the bottom of the page, the best place is in the top right corner;
• do not put advanced search in a first level;
• do not oversize (or undersize) the input box, it must have comfortable size so that the user could see at least 3-4 words of the query;
• give correct name and proper size to the submit button (words “Search” and “Find” are more comprehensible than “Submit” or “Go”);
• do not mix search field with other functional elements (putting in one block the “Search“, “Register” and “Subscribe” buttons can really irritate visitors)

Be like Google – Use Instant Search!

I’m sure that you are familiar with the “Instant Search” feature which was implemented by Google few months ago. It’s not that easy to implement from the technical point of view, but it is worth your efforts. There is no doubt that your visitors will love to use this feature at your website, it is extremely user-friendly and saves their precious time.

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The “Call-to-action” buttons are one of the most essential designer’s tools in the tricky game of hunting for higher conversion rates. If you want to create a smart design, don’t forget to prioritize tasks that must compel your design. And one of the most important tasks will be soliciting your visitors to do something that you want them to do (whether it is buying something, adding a product to cart, signing up or learning more). Today we want to dig a little deeper into what the important factors and techniques are, to help you create attractive designs that would be powerful marketing tools at your website.

Color

It is vitally important to highlight your buttons by using bright colors and contrast. It would be better to use really deep and rich colors that would dazzle your visitors with their shine. Contrast will help you separate your button from other elements on the page, so you shouldn’t share your button’s design with something else on the page.
Plus, you may want to check out a little colors in eCommerce research done by our good friends from Templates.com blog, it will help you choose proper colors based on what particular action you want a user to take.

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Size

Proportion and balance are the keys to your success because your button must be visible on the page, though you should be aware of over sizing. You should know that the button’s size depends on its importance over all other elements on the page. Usually buttons have the highest priority over other functional elements.

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The “Above the fold” term has successfully migrated to graphic design sphere from the publishing industry (just like many other wonderful things including typography etc.), to be precise this term was applied to the newspaper layout. You all know that the big stories are placed in the upper part of the newspaper (which was called ‘the fold’ ), and therefore these big stories were seen instantly when you are about to take a newspaper into your hands. Usually if you are interested in reading the main article you have to unfold the newspaper. So, in general this term can be applied to anything that must be displayed prominently. In web design “fold” or “scroll” is an imaginary line which separates two areas – first is the one that’s seen before the user will have to scroll and the other is under the scroll. According to the statistics “above the scroll” zone is one third from the whole page and this area is considered to be the most attractive for the visitors.

People Do Scroll

Since the early 90’s every designer knew that before creating web page he must decide for himsefl whether people actually scroll or not – that is the question. For a long, long period of the design theory’s development the myth has been created and its aim was to convince that scrolling is not what today’s web users want to do and that they’re too lazy to do that. So as the result a huge part of your website content remained to be unseen. To some extent It was true, for some time. But after a while some web enthusiasts started investigating this issue by providing various polls and gathering interesting statistics data.

One interesting research concerning AOL has showed that the most clickable link on their website was placed in the footer (!) and it was pointing to a popular gossips website. It sure looks like scrolling is not that bad, and users don’t want to spare their fingertips and they mercilessly use the scrolling wheel to find interesting content. There are many other wonderful examples but the point is that the “non-scrolling” myth has influenced the web design theory development in a negative way reducing the importance of creating intuitive designs. Therefore typical placement of vitally important design elements in the top of the website layout has created a trend to think of any website layout from the “non-scrolling” point of view, without giving any chance to popularizing other approaches in creating designs.
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From the very outset of the visualization science the primary moving force of the further development was a high demand of finding the ways to successfully and efficiently deliver the info. The significant cornerstone – or what we are now used to call “the message” – must be delivered to the recipient via the interaction process. Since the early ages humanity has been trying to improve the visualization techniques available (remember the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary methods of technical drawing?).

There is no doubt that computer graphics has pushed the development of visualization techniques to the limits by starting the new phase of this sphere. Without a doubt the leading role in IT visualization is taken by the problem of interactivity – any visual object which is being presented with a message to an audience must be relevant, useful and timely for a person.

Today there are 3 major forms of how you can visually present the info. These forms that can be applied to any web content are (i) text form, (ii) image-based form and (iii) videos. Let’s forget for a minute about the complicated explanations of visualization types in the web world (which are basically about two types of visualization – interactive and collaborative), instead we’d like to focus our attention on the things that we meet every day on the web simply by surfing trough various resources. The tips that we will point below will be useful for the bloggers and web design rookies because major content perception concepts help you a lot while creating the highly usable designs and promoting your blog.

Video content

Being a true leader of the web industry video content keeps pumping up its popularity and many experts forecast that this type of content will increase its major share within the next few years due the growing availability of video recording devices for the broad audience. While creating you video content you should remember several important things:

• The perfect duration of the any video is about 90-120 seconds. Everything that’s longer than that is less likely to be perceived.
• If your content requires more time than you should create an Intro (remember about the 90 seconds duration) and divide the rest of your content into sections, with a separate video for each new section. Plus, if you have the opportunity, provide a sort of a menu with links to these logical parts somewhere next to your initial intro.
• Consider several types of the video content:
  • Presentation with a host – ye goode olde method which is taken from the TV experience, the classics of web video content. Speaker’s skills, background decoration and the content itself are the key points that will affect the audience. So please consider these factors if you’ll decide to create such type of video.
  • Presentation of the product interface and functionality with the voiceover. Sounds pretty much self-discriptive, doesn’t it? You show what you’ve got and why someone would want to have it, like in the TV ads from the 1980-s. Visual coherence and laconic text are important here because the visitor must be informed about what he sees right now on the screen. Well-composed, understandable texts along with the informative video support are the perfect combination for this type of video content.
  • Presentation of the product interface and functionality with the stock music soundtrack – as you may have guessed, the visual aspects are of primary importance here and the music plays only a background role. Don’t forget that sometimes titles and text pop-ups can be great addition to this method as well.

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